A ponderomotive guiding center particle-in-cell code for efficient modeling of laser-plasma interactions

A novel particle simulation code is described that self-consistently models certain classes of laser-plasma interactions without resolving the optical cycles of the laser. This is accomplished by separating the electromagnetic field into a laser component and a wake component. Although the wake component is treated as in a fully explicit particle-in-cell (PIC) code, the laser component is treated in the high-frequency limit, which allows the optical cycles to be averaged out. This leads to enormous reductions in computer time when the laser frequency is much greater than all other frequencies of interest. This work is an extension of the work of Mora and Antonsen, Jr. (1996 and 1997), who derived the time-averaged equations coupling the laser with the particles and developed a code to solve these equations in the quasi-static limit. The code presented is distinguished by the fact that it is useful when the plasma length is much less than the laser pulse length. Also, it is already parallelized and should be straightforward to extend to three dimensions.