QuickPIC: A highly efficient fully parallelized PIC code for plasma-based acceleration

Abstract

A highly efficient, fully parallelized, fully relativistic, three-dimensional particle-incell model for simulating plasma and laser wakefield acceleration is described. The model is based on the quasi-static approximation, which reduces a fully three-dimensional electromagnetic field solve and particle push to a two-dimensional field solve and particle push. This is done by calculating the plasma wake assuming that the drive beam and/or laser does not evolve during the time it takes for it to pass a plasma particle. The complete electromagnetic fields of the plasma wake and its associated index of refraction are then used to evolve the drive beam and/or laser using very large time steps. This algorithm reduces the computation time by 2 to 3 orders of magnitude without loss of accuracy for highly nonlinear problems of interest. The code is fully parallelizable with different domain decompositions for the 2D and 3D pieces of the code. The code also has dynamic load balancing. We present the basic algorithms and design of QuickPIC, as well as comparison between the new algorithm and conventional fully explicit models (OSIRIS). Direction for future work is also presented including a software pipeline technique to further scale QuickPIC to 10,000+ processors. © 2006 IOP Publishing Ltd.