LASY: LAser manipulations made eaSY

TL;DR

LASY is an open-source Python library designed to streamline the process of initializing, manipulating, and exporting laser profiles for laser-plasma interaction simulations, bridging experimental data and simulation inputs.

Contribution

It introduces LASY, a novel tool that simplifies workflows by converting experimental and simulated laser profiles into standardized formats for simulations.

Findings

LASY enables easy import and manipulation of laser profiles.

It ensures compatibility with openPMD standard files.

The library facilitates accurate and efficient simulation setup.

Abstract

Using realistic laser profiles for simulations of laser-plasma interaction is critical to reproduce experimental measurements, but the interface between experiments and simulations can be challenging. Similarly, start-to-end simulations with different codes may require error-prone manipulations to convert between different representations of a laser pulse. In this work, we propose LASY, an open-source Python library to simplify these workflows. Developed through an international collaboration between experimental, theoretical and computational physicists, LASY can be used to initialize a laser profile from an experimental measurement, from a simulation, or from analytics, manipulate it, and write it into a file in compliance with the openPMD standard. This profile can then be used as an input of a simulation code.