Accurate modeling of plasma acceleration with arbitrary order pseudo-spectral particle-in-cell methods

Abstract

Particle in Cell (PIC) simulations are a widely used tool for the investigation of both laser- and beam-driven plasma acceleration. It is a known issue that the beam quality can be artificially degraded by numerical Cherenkov radiation (NCR) resulting primarily from an incorrectly modeled dispersion relation. Pseudo-spectral solvers featuring infinite order stencils can strongly reduce NCR, or even suppress it, and are therefore well suited to correctly model the beam properties. For efficient parallelization of the PIC algorithm, however, localized solvers are inevitable. Arbitrary order pseudo-spectral methods provide this needed locality. Yet, these methods can again be prone to NCR. Here, we show that acceptably low solver orders are sufficient to correctly model the physics of interest, while allowing for parallel computation by domain decomposition.

References in corpus (5)

• A spectral, quasi-cylindrical and dispersion-free Particle-In-Cell algorithm
• Detailed analysis of the effects of stencil spatial variations with arbitrary high-order finite-difference Maxwell solver
• Controlling the Numerical Cerenkov Instability in PIC simulations using a customized finite difference Maxwell solver and a local FFT based current correction
• Elimination of Numerical Cherenkov Instability in flowing-plasma Particle-In-Cell simulations by using Galilean coordinates
• Stable discrete representation of relativistically drifting plasmas

Cited by in corpus (12)

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• Efficient start-to-end 3D envelope modeling for two-stage laser wakefield acceleration experiments
• Colliding Pulse Injection of Polarized Electron Bunches in a Laser-Plasma Accelerator
• A generalized massively parallel ultra-high order FFT-based Maxwell solver
• Overcoming timestep limitations in boosted-frame Particle-In-Cell simulations of plasma-based acceleration
• Single Domain Multiple Decompositions for Particle-in-Cell simulations
• Modeling of Advanced Accelerator Concepts
• A Hybrid Nodal-Staggered Pseudo-Spectral Electromagnetic Particle-In-Cell Method with Finite-Order Centering
• High brightness, symmetric electron bunch generation in a plasma wakefield accelerator via a radially-polarized plasma photocathode
• Robustness Optimization for Compact Free-electron Laser Driven by Laser Wakefield Accelerators