Photon-Plasma: a modern high-order particle-in-cell code

Abstract

We present the Photon-Plasma code, a modern high order charge conserving particle-in-cell code for simulating relativistic plasmas. The code is using a high order implicit field solver and a novel high order charge conserving interpolation scheme for particle-to-cell interpolation and charge deposition. It includes powerful diagnostics tools with on-the-fly particle tracking, synthetic spectra integration, 2D volume slicing, and a new method to correctly account for radiative cooling in the simulations. A robust technique for imposing (time-dependent) particle and field fluxes on the boundaries is also presented. Using a hybrid OpenMP and MPI approach the code scales efficiently from 8 to more than 250.000 cores with almost linear weak scaling on a range of architectures. The code is tested with the classical benchmarks particle heating, cold beam instability, and two-stream instability. We also present particle-in-cell simulations of the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, and new results on radiative collisionless shocks.

24 pages, 15 figures, submitted to physics of plasmas. v2: corrected typos, added references

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• Relativistic Brownian Motion
• Magnetic field evolution in relativistic unmagnetized collisionless shocks
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• Particle-In-Cell Simulation of Electron Acceleration in Solar Coronal Jets
• Electromagnetic turbulence driven by the mixed mode instability
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