DOD-SBIR Structured Multi-Resolution PIC Code for Electromagnetic Plasma Simulations, Final Report

Abstract

A novel electromagnetic solver with mesh refinement capability was implemented in Warp. The solver allows for calculations in 2-1/2 and 3 dimensions, includes the standard Yee stencil, and the Cole-Karkkainen stencil for lower numerical dispersion along the principal axes. Warp implementation of the Cole-Karkkainen stencil includes an extension to perfectly matched layers (PML) for absorption of waves, and is preserving the conservation property of charge conserving current deposition schemes, like the Buneman-Villanesor and Esirkepov methods. Warp's mesh refinement framework (originally developed for electrostatic calculations) was augmented to allow for electromagnetic capability, following the methodology presented in [1] extended to an arbitrary number of refinement levels. Other developments include a generalized particle injection method, internal conductors using stair-cased approximation, and subcycling of particle pushing. The solver runs in parallel using MPI message passing, with a choice at runtime of 1D, 2D and 3D domain decomposition, and is shown to scale linearly on a test problem up-to 32,768 CPUs. The novel solver was tested on the modeling of filamentation instability, fast ignition, ion beam induced plasma wake, and laser plasma acceleration.