UCLA Plasma Simulation Group

Software

Production codes

The UCLA Plasma Simulation Group and its collaborators develop, maintain and improve several production codes: OSIRIS, QuickPIC, QPAD, UPIC-EMMA and OSHUN.

OSIRIS is a fully parallelized, fully relativistic and highly optimized multi-dimensional PIC code that combines a finite-difference field solver with a rigorous charge-conserving current deposit. It is used to study intense laser- and beam-plasma interactions, plasma-based acceleration, laser-solid interactions, the nonlinear optics of high-energy-density plasmas, and plasma astrophysics. It can model problems in Lorentz-boosted frames, in quasi-3D geometry (PIC in r–z and gridless in the azimuthal angle), and with a hybrid FFT/finite-difference field solver. OSIRIS is open source; a GPU version, developed in our group, will be added to the open-source release.

QuickPIC is a fully three-dimensional quasi-static PIC code, built from components of the UPIC Framework, for modeling short-pulse beam- and laser-plasma interactions. QPAD combines the quasi-static approximation with an azimuthal Fourier decomposition, making it orders of magnitude faster than 3D quasi-static codes for problems that are close to azimuthally symmetric.

UPIC-EMMA is a parallel, fully relativistic PIC code built on the UPIC Framework that uses a spectral (FFT-based) field solver.

OSHUN is a parallel, multi-dimensional Vlasov–Fokker–Planck code in which the distribution function is expanded into an arbitrary number of spherical harmonics in momentum space, with a Landau–Boltzmann collision operator.

Availability