The Electric Field Plotting and Lorentz Transformation Tool (elfplott) is a physics visualization software that plots the electric field of a given static charge distribution, and plots the electromagnetic fields in an inertial reference frame that is moving relative to the charge distribution.

elfplott was created as part of the Physics 414-1 Winter 2021 numerical project.

Click here to watch a video tutorial.

The included Jupyter notebook Tutorial.ipynb demonstrates the main features of elfplott.

To run elfplott, Python 3 and the dependencies listed below are required.

• Create a rest frame charge distribution composed of point charges
• Import a charge distribution from an image
• Plot the electric field in the rest frame on the xy-plane
• Perform a Lorentz boost to an inertial frame moving along the x-axis relative to the rest frame of the charge distribution
• Plot the Lorentz transformed electric and magnetic fields in the inertial frame

• Matplotlib
• NumPy
• Pillow

• Plotting Vector Fields in Python
• Electric field
• Importing Image Data into NumPy Arrays
• Quadrupole