Lasy: an open-source library to initialize complex laser pulses in simulations of laser-plasma interactions

ORAL

Abstract

Simulations of laser-plasma interactions often require the injection of complex laser pulses at the beginning of the simulation. This includes for instance non-Gaussian laser profiles inferred from experimental measurements, as well as lasers with involved spatio-temporal correlations such as flying-focus lasers.

Here we present lasy [1], an open-source Python library that allows users to easily describe various complex laser profiles. Using lasy, this laser profile can then be saved in a standardized openPMD [2] file, which can then be read by a number of Particle-In-Cell (PIC) codes, including WarpX, HiPACE++, and FBPIC. In addition, lasy supports different geometries (Cartesian, cylindrical) and has advanced utilities to, e.g., propagate the laser pulse out of focus, before starting the PIC simulation.

[1] https://github.com/LASY-org/lasy

[2] https://github.com/openPMD/openPMD-standard

*This work is partially supported by the U.S. DOE Office of Science Office of HEP under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231, and by the CAMPA collaboration, a project of the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Offices of ASCR and HEP, Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program. We acknowledge support from DESY (Hamburg, Germany), a member of the Helmholtz Association HGF, and funding by the Helmholtz MT ARD.

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Presenters

  • Remi Lehe

    • Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Authors

  • Remi Lehe

    • Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

  • Igor A Andriyash

    • Laboratoire d'Optique Appliquée (LOA)

  • Luca Fedeli

    • Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique (CEA)

  • Angel Ferran Pousa

    • DESY

  • Axel Huebl

    • Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

  • Sören Jalas

    • DESY

  • Manuel Kirchen

    • DESY

  • Rob Shalloo

    • DESY

  • Jean-Luc Vay

    • Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

  • Maxence Thevenet

    • DESY