Vlasov Simulation of Relativistic Plasmas in 2D+2P

The increasing power and energy of multi-MegaJoule laser facilities are projected to yield electron temperature up to 10 keV. In this regime, when plasma densities approach quarter-critical, the phase velocity of plasma waves associated with Two Plasmon Decay and SRS backscatter will be close to the speed of light. Such waves would be strongly damped according to the non-relativistic dispersion relation, but not with the relativistic one. Here, the effect of relativity on stimulated Raman scattering is simulated with our new 2D+2P continuum LOKI code capable of simulating relativistic plasmas. The discretizations use sixth-order accurate conservative finite differences to reduce computational cost, and employ MPI parallelism to efficiently use large computational resources. Code performance is assessed for collisionless damping of Langmuir waves, and results are discussed in the context of theoretical prediction.