Abstract

The resolution of the system given by Maxwell’s equations and Vlasov equation in three dimensions can describe all the phenomena of interest for laser wakefield acceleration, with few exceptions (e.g. ionization). Such arduous task can be numerically completed using Particle in Cell (PIC) codes, where the plasma is sampled by an ensemble of macroparticles and the electromagnetic fields are defined on a computational grid. However, the resulting three dimensional PIC simulations require substantial resources and often yield a larger amount of information than the one necessary to study a particular aspect of a phenomenon. Reduced models, i.e. models of the Maxwell-Vlasov system taking into account approximations and symmetries, are thus of fundamental importance for preliminary studies and parametric scans. In this work, the implementation of one of these models in the code SMILEI, an envelope description of the laser-plasma interaction with cylindrical symmetry, is described.

Highlights

  • Laser Wakefield Acceleration (LWFA) [1,2,3,4] consists in the excitation of a plasma electron wave in the wake of an intense laser pulse propagating in an underdense plasma

  • Typical carrier wavelengths λ0 of lasers used to realize this kind of particle acceleration are of the order of one micron, while the plasma wavelength in typical regimes of LWFA is of the order of tens or hundreds of microns

  • The numerical method of choice to simulate LWFA is the Particle in Cell (PIC) method [5], where the plasma is discretized through an ensemble of macroparticles and the electromagnetic fields are defined on a grid that discretizes the physical space

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Summary

Introduction

Laser Wakefield Acceleration (LWFA) [1,2,3,4] consists in the excitation of a plasma electron wave in the wake of an intense laser pulse propagating in an underdense plasma. Reduced models exploiting physical approximations or symmetries are of paramount importance for preliminary studies and parametric scans necessary to model a LWFA experiment. One of these approximation is the envelope or ponderomotive approximation [7,8,9,10,11,12], where the laser is described through the complex envelope of its vector potential, eliminating the need to resolve its high frequency oscillations. Despite its inherent considerable reduction of the necessary computation time, the envelope model speed can be further increased taking advantage of

Review of the envelope model in cylindrical symmetry
Numerical implementation
Benchmarks
Conclusions

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