LCODE: a parallel quasistatic code for computationally heavy problems of plasma wakefield acceleration

TL;DR

LCODE is a highly resource-efficient, parallel quasistatic simulation code for plasma wakefield acceleration, capable of long-term, high-precision modeling of ultrarelativistic particle beams, even on modest hardware.

Contribution

The paper introduces a parallel MPI-based upgrade to LCODE, significantly accelerating long-distance plasma wakefield simulations while maintaining high accuracy and resource efficiency.

Findings

Parallelization speeds up calculations by hundreds of times.

LCODE can simulate long particle beams over extended distances.

The code maintains high numerical stability and precision.

Abstract

LCODE is a freely-distributed quasistatic 2D3V code for simulating plasma wakefield acceleration, mainly specialized at resource-efficient studies of long-term propagation of ultrarelativistic particle beams in plasmas. The beam is modeled with fully relativistic macro-particles in a simulation window copropagating with the light velocity; the plasma can be simulated with either kinetic or fluid model. Several techniques are used to obtain exceptional numerical stability and precision while maintaining high resource efficiency, enabling LCODE to simulate the evolution of long particle beams over long propagation distances even on a laptop. A recent upgrade enabled LCODE to perform the calculations in parallel. A pipeline of several LCODE processes communicating via MPI (Message-Passing Interface) is capable of executing multiple consecutive time steps of the simulation in a single pass. This approach can speed up the calculations by hundreds of times.