Development of a Virtual EM Detector for the Advanced Particle Accelerator Modeling Code WarpX

TL;DR

This paper introduces a GPU-accelerated virtual electromagnetic detector within the WarpX simulation code, enabling detailed measurement of electromagnetic fields in laser-driven particle acceleration models for high-performance computing applications.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel virtual diagnostic tool, FieldProbe, integrated into WarpX, capable of measuring electromagnetic fields with high precision in plasma acceleration simulations.

Findings

The diagnostic accurately measures electric and magnetic fields in simulations.

It operates efficiently on GPU clusters using MPI parallelization.

The tool enhances the analysis capabilities of laser-driven plasma acceleration models.

Abstract

In physics research particle accelerators are highly valued, and extraordinarily expensive, technical instruments. The high cost of particle accelerators results from the immense lengths required to accelerate particles to high energies, using radio frequency cavities. A current promising field of research, laser-driven particle acceleration has the potential to reduce the size, cost, and energy consumption of particle accelerators by orders of magnitude. To understand and control particle acceleration in plasmas using ultra-small spatial configurations, researchers have been developing computational models to simulate the acceleration environment. Within these models, computational scientists have introduced virtual diagnostics to serve as the digital parallel to experimental detectors. Using WarpX\cite{Vay:2021}, an advanced Particle-in-Cell code that simulates laser-driven particle acceleration, we have developed a virtual diagnostic to measure electromagnetic radiation. Such radiation can for instance be produced from scattered and transmitted laser beams. This \textit{FieldProbe} diagnostic measures individual field components for electric and magnetic fields at a point or at all points along a specified geometry (line or plane). This diagnostic is GPU-accelerated and parallelized using the Message Passing Interface (MPI) and can thus run on High Performance Computing Centers such as NERSC.