Efficient cylindrical envelope modeling for laser wakefield acceleration

Abstract

The resolution of the system given by Maxwell's equations and Vlasov equation in three dimensions can describe all the phenomena of interest for laser wakefield acceleration, with few exceptions (e.g. ionization). Such arduous task can be numerically completed using Particle in Cell (PIC) codes, where the plasma is sampled by an ensemble of macroparticles and the electromagnetic fields are defined on a computational grid. However, the resulting three dimensional PIC simulations require substantial resources and often yield a larger amount of information than the one necessary to study a particular aspect of a phenomenon. Reduced models, i.e. models of the Maxwell-Vlasov system taking into account approximations and symmetries, are thus of fundamental importance for preliminary studies and parametric scans. In this work, the implementation of one of these models in the code Smilei, an envelope description of the laser-plasma interaction with cylindrical symmetry, is described.