Implementation of a Mesh refinement algorithm into the quasi-static PIC code QuickPIC

TL;DR

This paper introduces a mesh refinement scheme into the QuickPIC quasi-static PIC code, enhancing simulation accuracy and efficiency for plasma-based acceleration studies, with parallelization and adaptive techniques to optimize computational resources.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel mesh refinement implementation in QuickPIC, including multigrid and FFT solvers, parallelization improvements, and preliminary adaptive mesh refinement for evolving witness beams.

Findings

Mesh refinement improves simulation accuracy.

Parallelization enhances computational efficiency.

Adaptive mesh refinement optimizes resource use for evolving beams.

Abstract

Plasma-based acceleration (PBA) has emerged as a promising candidate for the accelerator technology used to build a future linear collider and/or an advanced light source. In PBA, a trailing or witness particle beam is accelerated in the plasma wave wakefield (WF) created by a laser or particle beam driver. The distance over which the drive beam evolves is several orders of magnitude larger than the wake wavelength. This large disparity in length scales is amenable to the quasi-static approach. Three-dimensional (3D), quasi-static (QS), particle-in-cell (PIC) codes, e.g., QuickPIC, have been shown to provide high fidelity simulation capability with 2-4 orders of magnitude speedup over 3D fully explicit PIC codes. We describe a mesh refinement scheme that has been implemented into the 3D QS PIC code, QuickPIC. We use a very fine (high) resolution in a small spatial region that includes the witness beam and progressively coarser resolutions in the rest of the simulation domain. A fast multigrid Poisson solver has been implemented for the field solve on the refined meshes and a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) based Poisson solver is used for the coarse mesh. The code has been parallelized with both MPI and OpenMP, and the parallel scalability has also been improved by using pipelining. A preliminary adaptive mesh refinement technique is described to optimize the computational time for simulations with an evolving witness beam size. Several test problems are used to verify that the mesh refinement algorithm provides accurate results. The results are also compared to highly resolved simulations with near azimuthal symmetry using a new hybrid QS PIC code QPAD that uses a PIC description in the coordinates ($r$, $ct-z$) and a gridless description in the azimuthal angle, $\phi$.