Modeling beam-driven and laser-driven plasma Wakefield accelerators with XOOPIC

We present 2-D particle-in-cell simulations of both beam-driven and laser-driven plasma wakefield accelerators, using the object-oriented code XOOPIC, which is time explicit, fully electromagnetic, and capable of running on massively parallel supercomputers. Simulations of laser-driven wakefields with low (approximately 1016 W/cm2) and high (approximately 1018 W/cm2) peak intensity laser pulses are conducted in slab geometry, showing agreement with theory. Simulations of the E-157 beam wakefield experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, in which a 30 GeV electron beam passes through 1 m of preionized lithium plasma, are conducted in cylindrical geometry, obtaining good agreement with previous work. We briefly describe some of the more significant modifications to XOOPIC required by this work, and summarize the issues relevant to modeling electron-neutral collisions in a particle-in-cell code