Overcoming timestep limitations in boosted-frame Particle-In-Cell simulations of plasma-based acceleration

Abstract

Explicit electromagnetic Particle-In-Cell (PIC) codes are typically limited by the Courant- Friedrichs-Lewy (CFL) condition, which implies that the timestep multiplied by the speed of light must be smaller than the smallest cell size. In the case of boosted-frame PIC simulations of plasma-based acceleration, this limitation can be a major hinderance as the cells are often very elongated along the longitudinal direction and the timestep is thus limited by the small, transverse cell size. This entails many small-timestep PIC iterations, and can limit the potential speed-up of the boosted-frame technique. Here, by using a CFL-free analytical spectral solver, and by mitigating additional numerical instabilities that arise at large timestep, we show that it is possible to overcome traditional limitations on the timestep and thereby realize the full potential of the boosted-frame technique over a much wider range of parameters.

References in corpus (4)

• Elimination of Numerical Cherenkov Instability in flowing-plasma Particle-In-Cell simulations by using Galilean coordinates
• Accurate modeling of plasma acceleration with arbitrary order pseudo-spectral particle-in-cell methods
• Stable discrete representation of relativistically drifting plasmas
• Elimination of the numerical Cerenkov instability for spectral EM-PIC codes

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Accelerating Particle-in-Cell Kinetic Plasma Simulations via Reduced-Order Modeling of Space-Charge Dynamics using Dynamic Mode Decomposition
• A Hybrid Nodal-Staggered Pseudo-Spectral Electromagnetic Particle-In-Cell Method with Finite-Order Centering