Plasma Simulation in the Limit of Strong Radiation Reaction

Abstract

Plasma is encountered in many situations and thus investigating plasma properties is of interest. Simulating plasma dynamics can be computationally demanding, especially when high-intensity electromagnetic fields are present, such as in modern high-intensity lasers. A common approach to such simulations is to use a particle-incell code. In high-field situations the force of radiation reaction becomes important. Recently it has been shown that in the limit of strong fields this radiation reaction causes particles to travel along a radiation free direction. In this work a particle-incell code based on the principle of particles following this radiation free direction is presented and evaluated. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/ TornbergNils/rfd_solver. The code is found to produce sensible predictions in line with what is found by more conventional particle-in-cell codes.