Particle accelerators are ubiquitous in society as they are used in particle physics, materials science, structural biology, medicine, and transmutation of nuclear waste. In some cases these accelerators are more than a mile long and cost billions of dollars. If a new cheaper and more compact accelerator technology could be developed, it would transform our ability to use particle accelerators and enable their application to an even wider range of problems of scientific and societal benefit. This research will examine fundamental scientific questions aimed at developing compact particle accelerators based on plasma waves (these are waves moving in fully ionized gases) moving near the speed of light. It will also require generating state-of-the-art software that can be used on the nation's largest computers. The students and post-doctoral researchers trained under this grant will be part of the twenty first century work force in computational science and engineering as well as experts in plasma physics and accelerator physics.
This is an award to perform full-scale three-dimensional numerical experiments of high-intensity particle and laser beam-matter interactions to significantly advance the understanding of basic high-energy density science (HEDS) on ultra intense laser and particle beam plasma interactions. This understanding will aid in the quest to make plasma based accelerator stages for use in high energy physics colliders, next generation light sources, medicine, and homeland security. This work will continue to blend basic research with three-dimensional simulations, including full-scale particle-in-cell modeling of ongoing and planned experiments. High-fidelity full-scale modeling provides the means to extrapolate parameters into regimes that will not be accessible to experiments for years to come. During the past decade, a hierarchy of state-of-the-art PIC codes and data analysis tools for HEDS studies has been developed that not only include the necessary physics but also scale to more than 1,600,000 cores and can run on current many core hardware including GPUs and Intel Phi's. With this set of tools, the UCLA Simulation of Plasma Group is uniquely positioned to continue to make significant progress towards determining the feasibility of building a compact X-Ray Free Electron Laser (XFEL) in the next decade, and a future linear collider based on wakefield sections driven by lasers or particle beams.
