Karlsruhe 2011 – scientific programme

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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik

T 86: Projekte / PWA etc.

T 86.2: Talk

Wednesday, March 30, 2011, 17:00–17:15, 30.22: 020

Full-scale PWFA Simulations using a Discontinuous Galerkin Approach — •Erion Gjonaj — Technische Universität Darmstadt, TEMF, Schlossgartenstr. 8, 64289 Darmstadt, Germany

Plasma Wakefield Acceleration (PWFA) is one of the emerging technologies for the generation and acceleration of charged electron beams in linear colliders and free-electron lasers. The most critical issue with this technology concerns the choice of the PWFA design parameters (plasma density, excitation beam and laser intensity) which enables the generation of high quality beams with ultra-high energy. Beam dynamics simulations play a key role in the design of PWFA accelerators. The simulation of the PWFA process, however, poses immense challenges with respect to numerical accuracy as well as to computational efficiency. We describe the application of a high order Discontinuous Galerkin method in the time domain for PWFA simulations. The method is characterized by very low numerical dispersion errors. Furthermore, it is explicit by construction and easily parallelizable. It provides a much better alternative for particle based simulations compared to the conventional Particle-In-Cell (PIC/FDTD) method. In the context of PWFA accelerator design, this approach may lead to a substantial reduction of simulation times.