Hybrid Envelope Model / Boosted-Frame Simulations of Laser Wakefield Accelerators

Laser wakefield accelerators use a high-intensity laser pulse to drive a wave in a plasma that traps, transports, and accelerates electrons. The Texas Petawatt Laser experiment measures different electron energies (2 GeV) than predicted (7 GeV) by computer simulations. We present and analyze a method for efficiently performing higher-fidelity 3-D, particle-in-cell simulations of laser wakefield acceleration. This method combines previous work on a Laser Envelope Model, which resolves electron self-injection, and boosted-frame simulation, which efficiently models beam propagation in the regime where the Envelope Model is no longer valid.\\[4pt] This work is supported by the DOE under Grants No. DE-SC0011617 and DE-SC0012444, by DOE/NSF Grant No. DE-SC0012584, and used resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science User Facility supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231.