Fine wakefield structure in the blowout regime of plasma wakefield accelerators

Abstract

For simulations of plasma wakefield acceleration (PWFA) and similar problems, we developed twodimensional fully electromagnetic fully relativistic hybrid code LCODE. The code is very fast due to explicit use of several simplifying assumptions (quasistatic approximation, ultrarelativistic beam, and the symmetry). With LCODE, we make high-resolution simulations of the blowout regime of PWFA and study the temperature effect on the amplitude of the accelerating field spike.

QUICKPIC: A highly efficient particle-in-cell code for modeling wakefield acceleration in plasmas

“…Other directions for future code development are the use of k dependent diffusion coefficients in the iteration loop, adaptive time steps in the 2D loop [14] and the use of pipelining. In QuickPIC, the 2D code views n as a time variable so the calculation is sequential in n, and because the speed of the moving window is c, no information is passed backward in n in the 3D code where n is treated as a spatial variable.…”

“…Whittum's code did not include the evolution of a laser field and made approximations to the wake field equations that are only appropriate to narrow driver beam bunches with moderate amounts of charge. Very recently, Lotov [14] reported on a 2D quasi-static code which is essentially identical to WAKE but for modeling PWFA.…”

Path to AWAKE: Evolution of the concept

“…Because of the complexity of the problem, several well benchmarked codes were used in AWAKE related studies: kinetic LCODE [68][69][70], fluid LCODE [28], OSIRIS [34], Quick-PIC [71], and VLPL [72,73]. Different plasma models implemented in these codes made it possible to choose the optimum simulation tool for each task.…”

Update of Proton Driven Plasma Wakefield Acceleration

“…In the PDPWA study, a 2D program LCODE [9] and the 3D code VLPL [10] are initially used to simulate the wakefield excited inside the plasma cell. More recently, another fully electromagnetic 3D code OSIRIS [11] and a 3D quasi-static code QuickPIC [12] are also employed to benchmark the results from various codes mentioned above.…”