Recently a complementary modeling paradigm has been established – mesh-free plasma simulation – in which fast summation techniques replace the solution of the field equations on the mesh. The key innovation behind this development is the hierarchical tree algorithm, a rapid O(N log N) technique for evaluating mutual (Coulomb) forces due to an ensemble of charged particles, permitting hi-fidelity simulation of certain collective and collisional plasma phenomena in a variety of physical settings and geometries. Recent studies performed at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre on the development and application of the above two paradigms will be presented, including electron and ion acceleration with high-intensity, few-cycle lasers, QED-induced opacity of multi-petawatt laser beams interacting with solid targets, and fully kinetic treatments of the Kelvin-Helmholtz and Weibel filamentation instabilities in magnetized plasmas.
The Extreme Light Infrastructure ERIC
