Pseudo-spectral Maxwell solvers for an accurate modeling of Doppler harmonic generation on plasma mirrors with Particle-In-Cell codes

TL;DR

This paper identifies limitations of standard FDTD Maxwell solvers in modeling Doppler harmonic generation in plasma mirrors and proposes pseudo-spectral solvers as a more accurate alternative for 3D simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a toy-model to predict harmonic angular deviations caused by numerical dispersion and demonstrates that pseudo-spectral solvers significantly reduce this artifact, enabling realistic 3D PIC simulations.

Findings

FDTD solvers induce angular deviations in harmonic beams due to numerical dispersion.

Pseudo-spectral solvers reduce the required resolution for accurate harmonic modeling.

The proposed approach enables feasible 3D simulations of Doppler harmonic generation.

Abstract

With the advent of PW class lasers, the very large laser intensities attainable on-target should enable the production of intense high order Doppler harmonics from relativistic laser-plasma mirrors interactions. At present, the modeling of these harmonics with Particle-In-Cell (PIC) codes is extremely challenging as it implies an accurate description of tens of harmonic orders on a a broad range of angles. In particular, we show here that standard Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) Maxwell solvers used in most PIC codes partly fail to model Doppler harmonic generation because they induce numerical dispersion of electromagnetic waves in vacuum which is responsible for a spurious angular deviation of harmonic beams. This effect was extensively studied and a simple toy-model based on Snell-Descartes law was developed that allows us to finely predict the angular deviation of harmonics depending on the spatio-temporal resolution and the Maxwell solver used in the simulations. Our model demonstrates that the mitigation of this numerical artifact with FDTD solvers mandates very high spatio-temporal resolution preventing doing realistic 3D simulations. We finally show that non dispersive pseudo-spectral analytical time domain solvers can considerably reduce the spatio-temporal resolution required to mitigate this spurious deviation and should enable in the the near future 3D accurate modeling on supercomputers in a realistic time-to-solution.