arXiv subjects

Jean-Luc Vay

Publications and source records attributed to Jean-Luc Vay.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Macroparticles with different weights relax to different temperatures in Particle-In-Cell simulations

A distinctive feature of Particle-In-Cell (PIC) simulations is the use of macroparticles, each representing many physical particles. The associated macroparticle weight can vary from one species to another, or even from one macroparticle to another. Here we show that, when macroparticles have different weights, the plasma evolves toward an unphysical thermal equilibrium in which the temperatures are unequal: lower-weight macroparticles reach a higher temperature than physically expected, and higher-weight macroparticles a lower one. We show that this unphysical equilibrium is difficult to avoid, but that reaching it takes time, and that the associated timescale depends on the effective collisionality of the PIC algorithm. We derive an equation that predicts the full time evolution of the temperatures, in good agreement with PIC simulations, and use it to identify strategies to delay the establishment of this unphysical thermal equilibrium.

physics.comp-ph↗

arXiv2026

The Memory Scaling of Reverse-Mode Differentiation in Particle Accelerator Simulations with Space Charge

The recent development of differentiable simulation codes for particle accelerators has enabled gradient-based workflows that promise finer control and more realistic modeling of accelerator facilities. However, when using reverse-mode automatic differentiation, the memory usage continuously increases during the simulation, and can potentially exceed the available hardware memory -- especially when costly space charge computation is included. To study the memory requirements for differentiable simulations, we have implemented space charge in Cheetah, a PyTorch-based beam tracking code that supports reverse-mode differentiation. We find that the memory usage for reverse-mode differentiation grows linearly with the number of macroparticles and cells, and that it is proportional to the number of space charge kicks involved in the simulation. This general scaling can be used to evaluate whether a given differentiable simulation is feasible given hardware memory constraints.

physics.acc-ph↗

arXiv2025

Design Initiative for a 10 TeV pCM Wakefield Collider

This document outlines a community-driven Design Study for a 10 TeV pCM Wakefield Accelerator Collider. The 2020 ESPP Report emphasized the need for Advanced Accelerator R\&D, and the 2023 P5 Report calls for the ``delivery of an end-to-end design concept, including cost scales, with self-consistent parameters throughout." This Design Study leverages recent experimental and theoretical progress resulting from a global R\&D program in order to deliver a unified, 10 TeV Wakefield Collider concept. Wakefield Accelerators provide ultra-high accelerating gradients which enables an upgrade path that will extend the reach of Linear Colliders beyond the electroweak scale. Here, we describe the organization of the Design Study including timeline and deliverables, and we detail the requirements and challenges on the path to a 10 TeV Wakefield Collider.

physics.acc-ph↗

arXiv2024

Energy-Preserving Coupling of Explicit Particle-In-Cell with Monte Carlo Collisions

The Particle-In-Cell (PIC) and Monte Carlo Collisions (MCC) methods are workhorses of many numerical simulations of physical systems. Recently, it was pointed out that, while the two methods can be exactly - or nearly - energy-conserving independently, combining the two is leading to anomalous numerical heating. This paper reviews the standard explicit PIC-MCC algorithm, elucidates the origins of the anomalous numerical heating and explains how to couple the two methods such that the anomalous numerical heating is avoided.

physics.plasm-ph↗

arXiv2024

Dephasing of ion beams as Magnetic Vortex Acceleration regime transitions into a bubble-like field structure

The interaction of an ultra-intense laser pulse with a near critical density target results in the formation of a plasma channel, a strong azimuthal magnetic field and moving vortices. An application of this is the generation of energetic and collimated ion beams via Magnetic Vortex Acceleration. The optimized regime of Magnetic Vortex Acceleration is becoming experimentally accessible with new high intensity laser beamlines coming online and advances made in near critical density target fabrication. The robustness of the acceleration mechanism with realistic experimental conditions is examined with three-dimensional simulations. Of particular interest is the acceleration performance with different laser temporal contrast conditions, in some cases leading to pre-expanded target profiles prior to the arrival of the main pulse. Preplasma effects on the structure of the accelerating fields is explored, including a detailed analysis of the ion beam properties and the efficiency of the process. Improved scaling laws for the MVA mechanism, including the laser focal spot size effects, are presented.

physics.plasm-ph↗

arXiv2024

Application of mesh refinement to relativistic magnetic reconnection

During relativistic magnetic reconnection, antiparallel magnetic fields undergo a rapid change in topology, releasing a large amount of energy in the form of non-thermal particle acceleration. This work explores the application of mesh refinement to 2D reconnection simulations to efficiently model the ineherent disparity in length-scales. We have systematically investigated the effects of mesh refinement and determined necessary modifications to the algorithm required to mitigate non-physical artifacts at the coarse-fine interface. We have used the ultrahigh-order Pseudo-Spectral Analytical Time-Domain (PSATD) Maxwell solver to analyze how its use can mitigate the numerical dispersion that occurs with the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) (or ``Yee'') method. Absorbing layers are introduced at the coarse-fine interface to eliminate spurious effects that occur with mesh refinement. We also study how damping the electromagnetic fields and current density in the absorbing layer can help prevent the non-physical accumulation of charge and current density at the coarse-fine interface. Using a mesh refinement ratio of 8 for two-dimensional magnetic reconnection simulations, we obtained good agreement with the high resolution baseline simulation, using only 36% of the macroparticles and 71% of the node-hours needed for the baseline. The methods presented here are especially applicable to 3D systems where higher memory savings are expected than in 2D, enabling comprehensive, computationally efficient 3D reconnection studies in the future.

physics.comp-ph↗

arXiv2024

Comparison of WarpX and GUINEA-PIG for electron positron collisions

As part of the Snowmass'21 planning exercise, the Advanced Accelerator Concepts community proposed developing multi-TeV linear colliders and considered beam-beam effects for these machines. Such colliders operate under a high disruption regime with an enormous number of electron-positron pairs produced from QED effects. Thus, it requires a self-consistent treatment of the fields produced by the pairs, which is not implemented in state-of-the-art beam-beam codes such as GUINEA-PIG. WarpX is a parallel, open-source, and portable particle-in-cell code with an active developer community that models QED processes with photon and pair generation in relativistic laser-beam interactions. However, its application to beam-beam collisions has yet to be fully explored. In this work, we benchmark the luminosity spectra, photon spectra, and coherent production process from WarpX against GUINEA-PIG in the ILC and ultra-tight collision scenarios. Our performance comparison demonstrates a significant speed-up advantage of WarpX, ensuring a more robust and efficient modeling of electron-positron collisions at multi-TeV energies.

physics.acc-ph↗

arXiv2024

Synthesizing Particle-in-Cell Simulations Through Learning and GPU Computing for Hybrid Particle Accelerator Beamlines

Particle accelerator modeling is an important field of research and development, essential to investigating, designing and operating some of the most complex scientific devices ever built. Kinetic simulations of relativistic, charged particle beams and advanced plasma accelerator elements are often performed with high-fidelity particle-in-cell simulations, some of which fill the largest GPU supercomputers. Start-to-end modeling of a particle accelerator includes many elements and it is desirable to integrate and model advanced accelerator elements fast, in effective models. Traditionally, analytical and reduced-physics models fill this role. The vast data from high-fidelity simulations and power of GPU-accelerated computation open a new opportunity to complement traditional modeling without approximations: surrogate modeling through machine learning. In this paper, we implement, present and benchmark such a data-driven workflow, synthesising a fully GPU-accelerated, conventional-surrogate simulation for hybrid particle accelerator beamlines.

physics.acc-ph↗

arXiv2024

LASY: LAser manipulations made eaSY

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.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2023

PIC-JR$_{ho}$m: a pseudo-spectral Particle-In-Cell formulation with arbitrary charge and current densities time dependencies for the modeling of relativistic plasmas

This paper introduces a novel formulation of the Particle-In-Cell (PIC) method for the modeling of relativistic plasmas, which leverages the ability of the Pseudo-Spectral Analytical Time-Domain solver (PSATD) to handle arbitrary time dependencies of the charge and current densities during one PIC cycle. The new formulation is applied to a modified set of Maxwell's equations that was proposed earlier in the context of divergence cleaning, and to recently proposed extensions of the PSATD-PIC algorithm. Detailed analysis and testings revealed that, under some condition, the new formulation can expand the range of numerical parameters under which PIC simulations are stable and accurate when modeling relativistic plasmas such as, e.g., plasma-based particle accelerators.

physics.plasm-ph↗

arXiv2023

State of In Situ Visualization in Simulations: We are fast. But are we inspiring?

Visualization of dynamic processes in scientific high-performance computing is an immensely data intensive endeavor. Application codes have recently demonstrated scaling to full-size Exascale machines, and generating high-quality data for visualization is consequently on the machine-scale, easily spanning 100s of TBytes of input to generate a single video frame. In situ visualization, the technique to consume the many-node decomposed data in-memory, as exposed by applications, is the dominant workflow. Although in situ visualization has achieved tremendous progress in the last decade, scaling to system-size together with the application codes that produce its data, there is one important question that we cannot skip: is what we produce insightful and inspiring?

cs.DC↗

arXiv2023

Laser-Plasma Ion Beam Booster Based on Hollow-Channel Magnetic Vortex Acceleration

Laser-driven ion acceleration provides ultra-short, high-charge, low-emittance beams, which are desirable for a wide range of high-impact applications. Yet after decades of research, a significant increase in maximum ion energy is still needed. This work introduces a quality-preserving staging concept for ultra-intense ion bunches that is seamlessly applicable from the non-relativistic plasma source to the relativistic regime. Full 3D particle-in-cell simulations prove robustness and capture of a high-charge proton bunch, suitable for readily available and near-term laser facilities.

physics.acc-ph↗

arXiv2023

Beam Delivery and Beamstrahlung Considerations for Ultra-High Energy Linear Colliders

As part of the Snowmass'21 community planning excercise, the Advanced Accelerator Concepts (AAC) community proposed future linear colliders with center-of-mass energies up to 15 TeV and luminosities up to 50$\times10^{34}$ cm$^{-2}$s$^{-1}$ in a compact footprint. In addition to being compact, these machines must also be energy efficient. We identify two challenges that must be addressed in the design of these machines. First, the Beam Delivery System (BDS) must not add significant length to the accelerator complex. Second, beam parameters must be chosen to mitigate beamstrahlung effects and maximize the luminosity-per-power of the machine. In this paper, we review advances in plasma lens technology that will help to reduce the length of the BDS system and we detail new Particle-in-Cell simulation studies that will provide insight into beamstrahlung mitigation techniques. We apply our analysis to both $e^+e^-$ and $γγ$ colliders.

physics.acc-ph↗

arXiv2023

Particle-in-Cell Simulations of Relativistic Magnetic Reconnection with Advanced Maxwell Solver Algorithms

Relativistic magnetic reconnection is a non-ideal plasma process that is a source of non-thermal particle acceleration in many high-energy astrophysical systems. Particle-in-cell (PIC) methods are commonly used for simulating reconnection from first principles. While much progress has been made in understanding the physics of reconnection, especially in 2D, the adoption of advanced algorithms and numerical techniques for efficiently modeling such systems has been limited. With the GPU-accelerated PIC code WarpX, we explore the accuracy and potential performance benefits of two advanced Maxwell solver algorithms: a non-standard finite difference scheme (CKC) and an ultrahigh-order pseudo-spectral method (PSATD). We find that for the relativistic reconnection problem, CKC and PSATD qualitatively and quantitatively match the standard Yee-grid finite-difference method. CKC and PSATD both admit a time step that is 40% longer than Yee, resulting in a ~40% faster time to solution for CKC, but no performance benefit for PSATD when using a current deposition scheme that satisfies Gauss's law. Relaxing this constraint maintains accuracy and yields a 30% speedup. Unlike Yee and CKC, PSATD is numerically stable at any time step, allowing for a larger time step than with the finite-difference methods. We found that increasing the time step 2.4-3 times over the standard Yee step still yields accurate results, but only translates to modest performance improvements over CKC due to the current deposition scheme used with PSATD. Further optimization of this scheme will likely improve the effective performance of PSATD.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2023

Light-Matter Interaction Near the Schwinger Limit Using Tightly Focused Doppler-Boosted Lasers

The Schwinger limit could be approached by focusing to its diffraction limit the light reflected by a plasma mirror irradiated by a multi-petawatt laser. We explore numerically the interaction between such intense light and matter. We find that the interaction with a relativistic counterpropagative electron beam would enable the exploration of the fully nonperturbative regime of strong-field quantum electrodynamics (SF-QED), while the interaction with an initially solid target leads to a profusion of SF-QED effects that retroact on the laser-plasma interaction. We observe in both scenarios the formation of relativistic attosecond electron-positron jets with very high densities.

physics.plasm-ph↗

arXiv2023

From Compact Plasma Particle Sources to Advanced Accelerators with Modeling at Exascale

Developing complex, reliable advanced accelerators requires a coordinated, extensible, and comprehensive approach in modeling, from source to the end of beam lifetime. We present highlights in Exascale Computing to scale accelerator modeling software to the requirements set for contemporary science drivers. In particular, we present the first laser-plasma modeling on an exaflop supercomputer using the US DOE Exascale Computing Project WarpX. Leveraging developments for Exascale, the new DOE SCIDAC-5 Consortium for Advanced Modeling of Particle Accelerators (CAMPA) will advance numerical algorithms and accelerate community modeling codes in a cohesive manner: from beam source, over energy boost, transport, injection, storage, to application or interaction. Such start-to-end modeling will enable the exploration of hybrid accelerators, with conventional and advanced elements, as the next step for advanced accelerator modeling. Following open community standards, we seed an open ecosystem of codes that can be readily combined with each other and machine learning frameworks. These will cover ultrafast to ultraprecise modeling for future hybrid accelerator design, even enabling virtual test stands and twins of accelerators that can be used in operations.

physics.acc-ph↗

arXiv2022

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

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.

physics.acc-ph↗

arXiv2022

Absorption of charged particles in Perfectly-Matched-Layers by optimal damping of the deposited current

Perfectly-Matched Layers (PML) are widely used in Particle-In-Cell simulations, in order to absorb electromagnetic waves that propagate out of the simulation domain. However, when charged particles cross the interface between the simulation domain and the PMLs, a number of numerical artifacts can arise. In order to mitigate these artifacts, we introduce a new PML algorithm whereby the current deposited by the macroparticles in the PML is damped by an analytically-derived, optimal coefficient. The benefits of this new algorithm is illustrated in practical simulations.

physics.plasm-ph↗