1,523 research outputs found
One-to-one full scale simulations of laser wakefield acceleration using QuickPIC
We use the quasi-static particle-in-cell code QuickPIC to perform full-scale,
one-to-one LWFA numerical experiments, with parameters that closely follow
current experimental conditions. The propagation of state-of-the-art laser
pulses in both preformed and uniform plasma channels is examined. We show that
the presence of the channel is important whenever the laser self-modulations do
not dominate the propagation. We examine the acceleration of an externally
injected electron beam in the wake generated by 10 J laser pulses, showing that
by using ten-centimeter-scale plasma channels it is possible to accelerate
electrons to more than 4 GeV. A comparison between QuickPIC and 2D OSIRIS is
provided. Good qualitative agreement between the two codes is found, but the 2D
full PIC simulations fail to predict the correct laser and wakefield
amplitudes.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication IEEE TPS, Special Issue
- Laser & Plasma Accelerators - 8/200
Elimination of the numerical Cerenkov instability for spectral EM-PIC codes
When using an electromagnetic particle-in-cell (EM-PIC) code to simulate a
relativistically drifting plasma, a violent numerical instability known as the
numerical Cerenkov instability (NCI) occurs. The NCI is due to the unphysical
coupling of electromagnetic waves on a grid to wave-particle resonances,
including aliased resonances, i.e., , where and refer to the time and space
aliases and the plasma is drifting relativistically at velocity in the
-direction. Recent studies have shown that an EM-PIC code which uses a
spectral field solver and a low pass filter can eliminate the fastest growing
modes of the NCI. Based on these studies a new spectral PIC code for studying
laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA) in the Lorentz boosted frame was developed.
However, we show that for parameters of relevance for LWFA simulations in the
boosted frame, a relativistically drifting plasma is susceptible to a host of
additional unstable modes with lower growth rates, and that these modes appear
when the fastest growing unstable modes are filtered out. We show that these
modes are most easily identified as the coupling between modes which are purely
transverse (EM) and purely longitudinal (Langmuir) in the rest frame of the
plasma for specific time and space aliases. We rewrite the dispersion relation
of the drifting plasma for a general field solver and obtain analytic
expressions for the location and growth rate for each unstable mode, i.e, for
each time and space aliased resonances. We show for the spectral solver that
when the fastest growing mode is eliminated a new mode at the fundamental
resonance () can be seen. (Please check the whole abstract in the
paper).Comment: 36 pages, 12 figure
Beam loading in the nonlinear regime of plasma-based acceleration
A theory that describes how to load negative charge into a nonlinear,
three-dimensional plasma wakefield is presented. In this regime, a laser or an
electron beam blows out the plasma electrons and creates a nearly spherical ion
channel, which is modified by the presence of the beam load. Analytical
solutions for the fields and the shape of the ion channel are derived. It is
shown that very high beam-loading efficiency can be achieved, while the energy
spread of the bunch is conserved. The theoretical results are verified with the
Particle-In-Cell code OSIRIS.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, to appear in Physical Review Letter
A global simulation for laser driven MeV electrons in -diameter fast ignition targets
The results from 2.5-dimensional Particle-in-Cell simulations for the
interaction of a picosecond-long ignition laser pulse with a plasma pellet of
50- diameter and 40 critical density are presented. The high density
pellet is surrounded by an underdense corona and is isolated by a vacuum region
from the simulation box boundary. The laser pulse is shown to filament and
create density channels on the laser-plasma interface. The density channels
increase the laser absorption efficiency and help generate an energetic
electron distribution with a large angular spread. The combined distribution of
the forward-going energetic electrons and the induced return electrons is
marginally unstable to the current filament instability. The ions play an
important role in neutralizing the space charges induced by the the temperature
disparity between different electron groups. No global coalescing of the
current filaments resulted from the instability is observed, consistent with
the observed large angular spread of the energetic electrons.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, to appear in Physics of Plasmas (May 2006
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