UCLA Plasma Simulation Group

Software / Production codes

UPIC-EMMA

UPIC-EMMA [1] is a fully relativistic, fully parallelized, multidimensional electromagnetic spectral PIC code built from components from the UPIC Framework. It uses a fully spectral (FFT) based field solver as described in [2]. It includes the ability to launch laser pulses in both the lab and Lorentz boosted frame. It includes options for eliminating the robust numerical instability (Numerical Cherenkov Instability-NCI) that arises when the plasma drifts across the grid relativistically. This is accomplished by modifying the field solver near NCI unstable modes in k-space which can be pinpointed based on theoretical work in [3-4]. It has been used to study laser wakefield acceleration and relativistic shocks.

UPIC-EMMA 2.0, built on UPIC 2.0 with MPI/OpenMP parallelization, is developed in a public GitHub repository.

References

  1. Yu, Peicheng, Xu, Xinlu, Decyk, Viktor K., An, Weiming, Vieira, Jorge, Tsung, Frank S., Fonseca, Ricardo A., Lu, Wei, Silva, Luis O., Mori, Warren B., “Modeling of laser wakefield acceleration in Lorentz boosted frame using EM-PIC code with spectral solver.” JOURNAL OF COMPUTATIONAL PHYSICS 266, 124 (2014). doi link

  2. J. M. Dawson, “Particle Simulation of Plasmas,” Rev. of Modern Phys. 55, 403 (1983). doi link

  3. Xu, Xinlu, Yu, Peicheng, Martins, Samual F., Tsung, Frank S., Decyk, Viktor K., Vieira, Jorge, Fonseca, Ricardo A., Lu, Wei, Silva, Luis O., Mori, Warren B., “Numerical instability due to relativistic plasma drift in EM-PIC simulations.” COMPUTER PHYSICS COMMUNICATIONS 184, 2503 (2013). doi link

  4. Peicheng Yu, Xinlu Xu, Viktor K. Decyk, Frederico Fiuza, Jorge Vieira, Frank S. Tsung, Ricardo A. Fonseca, Wei Lu, Luis O. Silva, Warren B. Mori, “Elimination of the numerical Cerenkov instability for spectral EM-PIC codes.” COMPUTER PHYSICS COMMUNICATIONS 192, 32 (2015). doi link