Observation of 1-D time dependent non-propagating laser plasma structures using Fluid and PIC codes

TL;DR

This study observes and analyzes long-lived, localized, non-propagating laser plasma structures in 1-D systems using fluid and PIC simulations, revealing their formation, evolution, and wave breaking phenomena.

Contribution

It demonstrates the spontaneous formation and persistence of non-propagating plasma structures and compares fluid and PIC simulation results, highlighting their similarities and differences.

Findings

Structures form spontaneously from solitonic collisions

Wave breaking leads to energy loss and particle heating

Remnant structures persist after wave breaking

Abstract

The manuscript reports the observation of time dependent localized and non-propagating structures in the coupled laser plasma system through 1-D fluid and PIC simulations. It is reported that such structures form spontaneously as a result of collision amongst certain exact solitonic solutions. They are seen to survive as coherent entities for a long time up to several hundreds of plasma periods. Furthermore, it is shown that such time dependence can also be artificially recreated by significantly disturbing the delicate balance between the radiation and the density fields required for the exact non-propagating solution obtained by Esirkepov et al. [1]. The ensuing time evolution is an interesting interplay between kinetic and field energies of the system. The electrostatic plasma oscillations are coupled with oscillations in the electromagnetic field. The inhomogeneity of the background and the relativistic nature, however, invariably produce large amplitude density perturbations leading to its wave breaking. In the fluid simulations, the signature of wave breaking can be discerned by a drop in the total energy which evidently gets lost to the grid. The PIC simulations are observed to closely follow the fluid simulations till the point of wave breaking. However, the total energy in the case of PIC simulations is seen to remain conserved all throughout the simulations. At the wave breaking the particles are observed to acquire thermal kinetic energy in the case of PIC. Interestingly, even after wave breaking, compact coherent structures with trapped radiation inside high-density peaks, continue to exist both in PIC and fluid simulations. Though the time evolution does not exactly match in the two simulations as it does prior to the process of wave breaking, the time-dependent features exhibited by the remnant structures are characteristically similar.