DOD-SBIR Structured Multi-Resolution PIC Code for Electromagnetic Plasma Simulations, Final Report

A novel electromagnetic solver with mesh refinement capability was implemented in Warp. The solver allows for calculations in 2-1/2 and 3 dimensions, includes the standard Yee stencil, and the Cole-Karkkainen stencil for lower numerical dispersion along the principal axes. Warp implementation of the Cole-Karkkainen stencil includes an extension to perfectly matched layers (PML) for absorption of waves, and is preserving the conservation property of charge conserving current deposition schemes, like the Buneman-Villanesor and Esirkepov methods. Warp's mesh refinement framework (originally developed for electrostatic calculations) was augmented to allow for electromagnetic capability, following the methodology presented in (1) extended to an arbitrary number of refinement levels. Other developments include a generalized particle injection method, internal conductors using stair-cased approximation, and subcycling of particle pushing. The solver runs in parallel using MPI message passing, with a choice at runtime of 1D, 2D and 3D domain decomposition, and is shown to scale linearly on a test problem up-to 32,768 CPUs. The novel solver was tested on the modeling of filamentation instability, fast ignition, ion beam induced plasma wake, and laser plasma acceleration.