Quantitatively consistent computation of coherent and incoherent radiation in particle-in-cell codes - a general form factor formalism for macro-particles

12 Feb 2018  ·  Richard Pausch, Alexander Debus, Axel Huebl, Ulrich Schramm, Klaus Steiniger, René Widera, Michael Bussmann ·

Quantitative predictions from synthetic radiation diagnostics often have to consider all accelerated particles. For particle-in-cell (PIC) codes, this not only means including all macro-particles but also taking into account the discrete electron distribution associated with them. This paper presents a general form factor formalism that allows to determine the radiation from this discrete electron distribution in order to compute the coherent and incoherent radiation self-consistently. Furthermore, we discuss a memory-efficient implementation that allows PIC simulations with billions of macro-particles. The impact on the radiation spectra is demonstrated on a large scale LWFA simulation.

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