Modeling of laser wakefield acceleration in Lorentz boosted frame using EM-PIC code with spectral solver

Abstract

Simulating laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA) in a Lorentz boosted frame in which the plasma drifts towards the laser with vb can speed up the simulation by factors of γb2=(1−vb2/c2)−1. In these simulations the relativistic drifting plasma inevitably induces a high frequency numerical instability that contaminates the interesting physics. Various approaches have been proposed to mitigate this instability. One approach is to solve Maxwell equations in Fourier space (a spectral solver) as this has been shown to suppress the fastest growing modes of this instability in simple test problems using a simple low pass or “ring” or “shell” like filters in Fourier space. We describe the development of a fully parallelized, multi-dimensional, particle-in-cell code that uses a spectral solver to solve Maxwell's equations and that includes the ability to launch a laser using a moving antenna. This new EM-PIC code is called UPIC-EMMA and it is based on the components of the UCLA PIC framework (UPIC). We show that by using UPIC-EMMA, LWFA simulations in the boosted frames with arbitrary γb can be conducted without the presence of the numerical instability. We also compare the results of a few LWFA cases for several values of γb, including lab frame simulations using OSIRIS, an EM-PIC code with a finite-difference time domain (FDTD) Maxwell solver. These comparisons include cases in both linear and nonlinear regimes. We also investigate some issues associated with numerical dispersion in lab and boosted frame simulations and between FDTD and spectral solvers.