Synthetic shadowgrams of laser-plasma accelerators computed by a PIConGPU in-situ plugin


Synthetic shadowgrams of laser-plasma accelerators computed by a PIConGPU in-situ plugin

Carstens, F.-O.; Steiniger, K.; Pausch, R.; Chang, Y.-Y.; Schöbel, S.; Couperus Cabadağ, J. P.; Irman, A.; Lehmann, M.; Widera, R.; Bussmann, M.; Schramm, U.; Cowan, T.; Debus, A.

Few-cycle shadowgraphy is a valuable diagnostic for laser-plasma accelerators to obtain insight into the µm- and fs-scale relativistic plasma dynamics. To enhance the understanding of experimental shadowgrams we developed a synthetic shadowgram diagnostic within the fully relativistic particle-in-cell code PIConGPU.

In an initial version of the synthetic shadowgraphy diagnostic, the probe laser is propagated through the plasma using PIConGPU, and then extracted and propagated onto a virtual CCD using a post-processing code based on Fourier optics. However, the latter step requires 3D-FFTs, which results in performance and scaling limitations in large-scale simulations. To circumvent this, we develop an in-situ plugin for PIConGPU, in which we extract the probe laser slice-wise to obtain the synthetic shadowgrams during the simulation without post-processing.

In this talk, we present the development of the PIConGPU plugin and show preliminary results of synthetic shadowgrams for laser and plasma wakefield accelerators.

Keywords: Shadowgraphy; Synthetic Diagnostics; PIConGPU; Laser-Electron Acceleration

  • Lecture (Conference) (Online presentation)
    Virtuelle DPG-Frühjahrstagung, 28.03.-01.04.2022, Mainz, Deutschland

Permalink: https://www.hzdr.de/publications/Publ-36299
Publ.-Id: 36299