Hydrodynamic Simulations of Plasma Accelerator Sources

Understanding the long-term dynamics of plasma sources is critical to improve several aspects of plasma acceleration including discharge control, laser guiding and repetition rate. Numerical simulations can provide helpful insight into the relevant dynamics, but they can be challenging. For the long-term dynamics covering thousands to billions of plasma periods the plasma is thermalized and can be described well by hydrodynamic simulations.

We propose a quasi-neutral single-fluid plasma model capturing long-term plasma dynamics relevant for plasma accelerators. The model uses two temperatures (for atoms and electrons, respectively) and the plasma composition is tracked via collisional reaction rates.

We will present simulation results capturing the full dynamics of hydrodynamic optical-field-ionized (HOFI) channels [R. J. Shalloo et al., Phys. Rev. E 97, 053203 (2018)], and show comparisons to measurements, and explore the effect of the main parameters on the channel properties.