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Title: photon-plasma: A modern high-order particle-in-cell code

Journal Article · · Physics of Plasmas
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4811384· OSTI ID:22228043
 [1];  [2];  [2]
  1. Centre for Star and Planet Formation, Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen, Øster Voldgade 5-7, DK-1350 Copenhagen (Denmark)
  2. Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Juliane Maries Vej 30, DK-2100 Copenhagen (Denmark)

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.

OSTI ID:
22228043
Journal Information:
Physics of Plasmas, Vol. 20, Issue 6; Other Information: (c) 2013 AIP Publishing LLC; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 1070-664X
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English