Accurate modeling of plasma acceleration with arbitrary order pseudo-spectral particle-in-cell methods

This is supplementary material to the publication  "Accurate modeling of plasma acceleration with arbitrary order pseudo-spectral particle-in-cell methods" by S. Jalas et. al.

Particle in Cell (PIC) simulations are a widely used tool for the investigation of both laser- and beam-driven plasma acceleration. It is a known issue that the beam quality can be artificially degraded by numerical Cherenkov radiation (NCR) resulting primarily from an incorrectly modeled dispersion relation. Pseudo- spectral solvers featuring infinite order stencils can strongly reduce NCR – or even suppress it – and are therefore well suited to correctly model the beam properties. For efficient parallelization of the PIC algorithm, however, localized solvers are inevitable. Arbitrary order pseudo-spectral methods provide this needed locality. Yet, these methods can again be prone to NCR. Here, we show that acceptably low solver orders are sufficient to correctly model the physics of interest, while allowing for parallel computation by domain decomposition.

The given script can be run with the open source particle in cell codes FBPIC (https://github.com/fbpic/fbpic) and Warp (https://bitbucket.org/berkeleylab/warp)

The produced data is conformant with the openPMD standard (openpmd.org) and can be analysed for example with the openPMD-viewer (https://github.com/openPMD/openPMD-viewer).