Speaker
Description
Numerical modeling of electromagnetic waves is a critical component of particle-in-cell simulation of laser–plasma interactions. Traditionally, laser pulses have been either launched from simulated antennas or initialized in their entirety in the computational domain. Relying on the electromagnetic field update to advance the laser pulse, however, imposes needless computational expense and complexity for a number of emerging applications. As an alternative, we demonstrate that laser pulses can be incorporated using analytic expressions provided that numerical dispersion is matched. The otherwise self-consistent treatment of the plasma reproduces 3-D–like focusing in lower-dimensional simulation, enables direct examination of approximate solutions to Maxwell’s equations including Laguerre–Gaussian beams, and facilitates the modeling of novel laser pulses including the spatiotemporally shaped flying focus.
Acknowledgments
This material is based upon work supported by the Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration under Award Number DE-NA0003856, the University of Rochester, and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. Particle-in-cell simulations were performed using EPOCH, developed under UK EPSRC Grant Nos. EP/G054940, EP/G055165, and EP/G056803. This work used the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), which is supported by National Science Foundation grant number ACI-1548562, and the XSEDE resource Stampede2 at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin, under allocation TG-PHY210072.
