Temporal resolution criterion for correctly simulating relativistic electron motion in a high-intensity laser field

Abstract

Particle-in-cell codes are now standard tools for studying ultra-intense laser-plasma interactions. Motivated by direct laser acceleration of electrons in sub-critical plasmas, we examine temporal resolution requirements that must be satisfied to accurately calculate electron dynamics in strong laser fields. Using the motion of a single electron in a perfect plane electromagnetic wave as a test problem, we show surprising deterioration of the numerical accuracy with increasing wave amplitude $a_0$ for a given time-step. We go on to show analytically that the time-step must be significantly less than $\lambda /c{a}_0$ to achieve good accuracy. We thus propose adaptive electron sub-cycling as an efficient remedy.

References in corpus (7)

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• Relativistic laser driven electron accelerator using micro-channel plasma targets
• The Unexpected Role of Evolving Longitudinal Electric Fields in Generating Energetic Electrons in Relativistically Transparent Plasmas
• Leveraging extreme laser-driven magnetic fields for gamma-ray generation and pair production
• Highly collimated electron acceleration by longitudinal laser fields in a hollow-core target
• Accurately simulating nine-dimensional phase space of relativistic particles in strong fields
• Explicit High-Order Gauge-Independent Symplectic Algorithms for Relativistic Charged Particle Dynamics
• Spin-polarized electron beam generation in the colliding-pulse injection scheme
• Special unitary particle pusher for extreme fields
• A relativistic particle pusher for ultra-strong electromagnetic fields
• Enhancement on Laser Intensity and Proton Acceleration Using Micro-tube Plasma Lens Targets
• Particle integrator for particle-in-cell simulations of ultra-high intensity laser-plasma interactions
• Laser-Pulse and Electron-Bunch Plasma Wakefield Accelerator
• Particle acceleration in neutron star ultra-strong electromagnetic fields
• An Analytic Boris Pusher for Plasma Simulation
• Explicit energy-conserving modification of relativistic PIC method
• A new field solver for modeling of relativistic particle-laser interactions using the particle-in-cell algorithm
• Hyper Boris integrators for kinetic plasma simulations