An improved iteration loop for the three dimensional quasi-static particle-in-cell algorithm: QuickPIC
- Department of Electrical Engineering, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095 (United States)
- Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095 (United States)
- Departments of Physics and Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 (United States)
We present improvements to the three-dimensional (3D) quasi-static particle-in-cell (PIC) algorithm, which is used to efficiently model short-pulse laser and particle beam–plasma interactions. In this algorithm the fields including the index of refraction created by a static particle/laser beam are calculated. These fields are then used to advance the particle/laser beam forward in time (distance). For a 3D quasi-static code, calculating the wake fields is done using a two-dimensional (2D) PIC code where the time variable is ξ=ct-z and z is the propagation direction of the particle/laser beam. When calculating the wake, the fields, particle positions and momenta are not naturally time centered so an iterative predictor corrector loop is required. In the previous iterative loop in QuickPIC (currently the only 3D quasi-static PIC code), the field equations are derived using the Lorentz gauge. Here we describe a new algorithm which uses gauge independent field equations. It is found that with this new algorithm, the results converge to the results from fully explicitly PIC codes with far fewer iterations (typically 1 iteration as compared to 2–8) for a wide range of problems. In addition, we describe a new deposition scheme for directly depositing the time derivative of the current that is needed in one of the field equations. The new deposition scheme does not require message passing for the particles inside the iteration loop, which greatly improves the speed for parallelized calculations. Comparisons of results from the new and old algorithms and to fully explicit PIC codes are also presented.
- OSTI ID:
- 22230797
- Journal Information:
- Journal of Computational Physics, Vol. 250; Other Information: Copyright (c) 2013 Elsevier Science B.V., Amsterdam, The Netherlands, All rights reserved.; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0021-9991
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
UCLA Final Technical Report for the "Community Petascale Project for Accelerator Science and Simulation”.
Modeling Laser Wake Field Acceleration with the Quasi-Static PIC Code QuickPIC