Modeling laser wakefield accelerator experiments with ultrafast particle-in-cell simulations in boosted frames

Abstract

The development of new laser systems at the 10 Petawatt range will push laser wakefield accelerators to novel regimes, for which theoretical scalings predict the possibility to accelerate electron bunches up to tens of GeVs in meter-scale plasmas. Numerical simulations will play a crucial role in testing, probing, and optimizing the physical parameters and the setup of future experiments. Fully kinetic simulations are computationally very demanding, pushing the limits of today's supercomputers. In this paper, the recent developments in the OSIRIS framework [R. A. Fonseca , Lect. Notes Comput. Sci. 2331, 342 (2002)] are described, in particular the boosted frame scheme, which leads to a dramatic change in the computational resources required to model laser wakefield accelerators. Results from one-to-one modeling of the next generation of laser systems are discussed, including the confirmation of electron bunch acceleration to the energy frontier.