Multi-scale simulation of intense laser plasma interactions
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Warwick
Department Name: Physics
Abstract
The UK is at the forefront of high power laser-plasma research through the work of the Central Laser Facility, which has consistently received the highest praise at international review. The recently formed Collaborative Computational Project in plasma physics (CCPP) directs a substantial part of its research effort towards modelling laser-plasma interactions, driven particularly by the existing experimental programme at the CLF and the proposal to extend this to even higher intensities with the Vulcan 10PW project. Two extremely important new developments are the European HiPER project for a laser based inertial confinement fusion demonstrator and the rapidly emerging application of laser-plasmas to light source applications for ultra-short pulses in the X-ray and gamma-ray spectrum. Laboratory applications of ultra-high power laser-plasmas also include medical applications using radiation and particle beams for diagnosis and therapy and the extreme conditions in some of these plasmas serve as laboratory analogues for astrophysical objects.It is vital that computer codes are available to help progress these new developments in plasma physics. The physics accessed by these experiments is often non-linear, relativistic and couples across many orders of magnitude of scale lengths and time scales. To understand the experiments and help improve performance computational modelling is an indispensable tool. The ranges of length and time scales that are relevant to these highly dynamical plasmas make it difficult to model the whole problem with a single numerical technique. For instance, in the case of HiPER fusion targets, MHD fluid models are appropriate during the compression phase, while the ensuing heating and burn phases require detailed kinetic modelling and the transport of particles across a density range of four orders of magnitude. Experiments planned for the Vulcan 10PW laser will probe quantum electrodynamic (QED) phenomena at the scale of the electron Compton length while laboratory experiments on magnetic reconnection may involve lengths up to 1 cm. There is still no single method which is applicable to the entirety of circumstances of laser plasma experiments but the Particle in Cell method (PIC) is remarkably robust, immediately useful for many of the high intensity experiments, and has the potential to be extended at short length scales towards the quantum regime and also at long scales towards the fluid regime using methods which, while very different in terms of physics, are similar in terms of the computational requirements.This exploration of new regimes of plasma physics requires new software to be developed to include this new physics. This project will extend the current codes used for plasma simulations in several directions. They will be optimised to make use of the largest computers, using 1000's of processor on national supercomputing facilities. The codes will be extend to include particle collisions in a novel, and fast, way enabling the extension to longer lengths and time scales. Including QED effects will extend their applicability down to shorter scale lengths and more intense lasers. Radiation from individual electrons, including coherent radiation, will help probe the new regimes expected to deliver the next generation of short pulse light sources. Finally all of this will be combined into a single computational tool allowing UK plasma physicists to easily exploit the tools they need to understand the next generation of experiments and establish a world leading role for UK computational laser plasma physics to compliment it's already established reputation in experimental laser plasma science.
Organisations
Publications
Wang T
(2021)
Effects of simulation dimensionality on laser-driven electron acceleration and photon emission in hollow microchannel targets.
in Physical review. E
Turrell A
(2016)
Efficient evaluation of collisional energy transfer terms for plasma particle simulations
in Journal of Plasma Physics
Gu Y
(2019)
Electromagnetic Burst Generation during Annihilation of Magnetic Field in Relativistic Laser-Plasma Interaction
in Scientific Reports
Wang T
(2020)
Electron confinement by laser-driven azimuthal magnetic fields during direct laser acceleration
in Physics of Plasmas
Jirka M
(2016)
Electron dynamics and ? and e(-)e(+) production by colliding laser pulses.
in Physical review. E
Edwards MR
(2020)
Electron-Nanobunch-Width-Dominated Spectral Power Law for Relativistic Harmonic Generation from Ultrathin Foils.
in Physical review letters
Wilson R
(2016)
Ellipsoidal plasma mirror focusing of high power laser pulses to ultra-high intensities
in Physics of Plasmas
Yang S
(2017)
Energy shift between two relativistic laser pulses copropagating in plasmas
in Physical Review A
Frazer T
(2020)
Enhanced laser intensity and ion acceleration due to self-focusing in relativistically transparent ultrathin targets
in Physical Review Research
Gray R
(2018)
Enhanced laser-energy coupling to dense plasmas driven by recirculating electron currents
in New Journal of Physics
Stark DJ
(2016)
Enhanced Multi-MeV Photon Emission by a Laser-Driven Electron Beam in a Self-Generated Magnetic Field.
in Physical review letters
Zhang P
(2015)
Enhancement of high-order harmonic generation in intense laser interactions with solid density plasma by multiple reflections and harmonic amplification
in Applied Physics Letters
Bennett, K
(2013)
EPOCH manual
Dieckmann M
(2014)
Evolution of slow electrostatic shock into a plasma shock mediated by electrostatic turbulence
in New Journal of Physics
Gu Y
(2015)
Fast magnetic field annihilation driven by two laser pulses in underdense plasma
in Physics of Plasmas
Gu YJ
(2016)
Fast magnetic-field annihilation in the relativistic collisionless regime driven by two ultrashort high-intensity laser pulses.
in Physical review. E
Marceau V
(2013)
Femtosecond 240-keV electron pulses from direct laser acceleration in a low-density gas.
in Physical review letters
Pathak N
(2012)
Frequency shift of an intense laser pulse induced by plasma wave
in Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A: Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment
Brady C
(2013)
Gamma-ray emission in near critical density plasmas
in Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion
Sorokovikova A
(2016)
Generation of Superponderomotive Electrons in Multipicosecond Interactions of Kilojoule Laser Beams with Solid-Density Plasmas.
in Physical review letters
Murakami M
(2018)
Generation of ultrahigh field by micro-bubble implosion
in Scientific Reports
King M
(2023)
Geometry effects on energy selective focusing of laser-driven protons with open and closed hemisphere-cone targets
in Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion
Description | There has been considerable international interest in a community plasma code for particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations. Understanding the community needs has lead to the development of an open project based on a modern redesign of PIC techniques. The resulting EPOCH code has re-invigorated this area of computational physics. Work on the EPOCH project continues through follow on EPSRC funding. |
Exploitation Route | The EPOCH is freely available world-wide with hundreds of international users in addition to its use in all UK plasma physics research groups. The key paper describing EPOCH is cited around 100 times per year with the EPOCH code used in roughly 40 papers per year. The development of EPOCH continues to be funded by EPSRC and the large community of users and developers is expected to keep EPOCH central to UK plasma physics research for at least a decade. |
Sectors | Communities and Social Services/Policy,Education,Electronics,Energy |
URL | https://cfsa-pmw.warwick.ac.uk/EPOCH/epoch/wikis/home |
Description | To handle the data from this project a new data format was developed (SDF). This is now used by one UK SME, Fluid Gravity limited, for their commercial codes. SDF is now released through GitHub. SDF allows complex data from HPC simulations to be easily ported between visualisation tools, HPC systems and applications. This has helped Fluid Gravity ltd. improve and harmonise their data management and has defined a standard for plasma physics with Warwick research. Beneficiaries: UK plasma physics code developers and UK SME Contribution Method: It replaced the existing data format used by SME in their commercial codes |
First Year Of Impact | 2012 |
Sector | Aerospace, Defence and Marine,Education,Energy |
Impact Types | Economic |
Description | CCP Flagship Project |
Amount | £380,448 (GBP) |
Funding ID | EP/M011534/1 |
Organisation | Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) |
Sector | Public |
Country | United Kingdom |
Start | 04/2015 |
End | 03/2018 |
Description | Centre for Computational Plasma Physics |
Amount | £326,643 (GBP) |
Funding ID | Contract V30286915 |
Organisation | Atomic Weapons Establishment |
Sector | Private |
Country | United Kingdom |
Start | 07/2014 |
End | 06/2017 |
Description | Centre for Computational Plasma Physics |
Amount | £264,129 (GBP) |
Organisation | Atomic Weapons Establishment |
Sector | Private |
Country | United Kingdom |
Start | 10/2017 |
End | 09/2022 |
Description | Extension and optimisation of the EPOCH code |
Amount | £236,478 (GBP) |
Funding ID | EP/P02212X/1 |
Organisation | Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) |
Sector | Public |
Country | United Kingdom |
Start | 06/2017 |
End | 05/2019 |
Description | Multi-scale simulations of intense laser-plasma interactions |
Amount | £439,082 (GBP) |
Funding ID | EP/G054940/1 |
Organisation | Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) |
Sector | Public |
Country | United Kingdom |
Start | 01/2010 |
End | 03/2014 |
Description | Plasma Physics HEC Consortia |
Amount | £279,000 (GBP) |
Funding ID | EP/L000237/1 |
Organisation | Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) |
Sector | Public |
Country | United Kingdom |
Start | 05/2013 |
End | 05/2018 |
Description | The Plasma-CCP Network |
Amount | £125,995 (GBP) |
Funding ID | EP/M022463/1 |
Organisation | Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) |
Sector | Public |
Country | United Kingdom |
Start | 07/2015 |
End | 06/2020 |
Title | Release of EPOCH code |
Description | Release of the EPOCH particle-in-cell code as a publicly available software package. EPOCH has been developed primarily at the University of Warwick as a multi-purpose plasma simulation code. QED algorithms and code to model gamma-ray and electron-positron pair production were developed at Oxford. Warwick implemented the QED package in the publicly released version of EPOCH. The fully documented code is available at https://cfsa-pmw.warwick.ac.uk/EPOCH/epoch. It is being used by experimentalists and theorists from many countries. This initial release of EPOCH was in 2011 but this is continually updated. |
Type Of Technology | Software |
Year Produced | 2016 |
Open Source License? | Yes |
Impact | The UK is now recognised as a world leading centre for kinetic plasma simulations for laser-plasmas |
URL | https://cfsa-pmw.warwick.ac.uk/EPOCH/epoch |