Extreme plasma states in laser-governed vacuum breakdown

Efimenko, Evgeny; Bashinov, A. V.; Bastrakov, Sergei; Gonoskov, Arkady; Muraviev, A.; Meyerov, Iosif B.; Kim, A. V.; Sergeev, A.

doi:10.1038/s41598-018-20745-y

Cited by 37 publications

(40 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…At a laser power exceeding the vacuum breakdown threshold, which is about 7.2 PW, pair production starts to grow exponentially in time [10,14]. The regime of interaction for P < 20 PW was studied in Ref.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Laser-driven plasma pinching in e−e+ cascade

et al. 2019

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The cascaded production and dynamics of electron-positron plasma in ultimately focused laser fields of extreme intensity are studied by 3D particle-in-cell simulations with the account for the relevant processes of quantum electrodynamics (QED). We show that, if the laser facility provides a total power above 20 PW, it is possible to trigger not only a QED cascade but also pinching in the produced electron-positron plasma. The plasma self-compression in this case leads to an abrupt rise of the peak density and magnetic (electric) field up to at least 10 28 cm −3 and 1/20 (1/40) of the Schwinger field, respectively. Determining the actual limits and physics of this process might require quantum treatment beyond the used standard semiclassical approach. The proposed setup can thus provide extreme conditions for probing and exploring fundamental physics of the matter and vacuum.

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confidence: 99%

“…The regime of interaction for P < 20 PW was studied in Ref. [14]. The specific feature of this regime is that the electromagnetic field structure remains almost unchanged, while the amplitude is reduced.…”

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confidence: 99%

Laser-driven plasma pinching in e−e+ cascade

et al. 2019

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“…One of the peculiar properties of such a plasma is that the mean energy per particle exceeds the rest mass of the electron, so it contains pairs of particles (electrons) and antiparticles (positrons). Attempts to create such a plasma in laboratory [2] are linked with the development of ultra-intense lasers [3,4,5,6,7] within large projects, such as ELI 1 and XCELS 2 . A number of interesting phenomena such as relativistic transparency [8], ultrafast thermalization in magnetized plasma [9] and current-driven instability [10] are predicted and observed in such a plasma.…”

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confidence: 99%

Thermalization of electron–positron plasma with quantum degeneracy

2019

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The non-equilibrium electron-positron-photon plasma thermalization process is studied using relativistic Boltzmann solver, taking into account quantum corrections both in non-relativistic and relativistic cases. Collision integrals are computed from exact QED matrix elements for all binary and triple interactions in the plasma. It is shown that in non-relativistic case (temperatures k B T ≤ 0.3m e c 2 ) binary interaction rates dominate over triple ones, resulting in establishment of the kinetic equilibrium prior to final relaxation towards the thermal equilibrium, in agreement with the previous studies. On the contrary, in relativistic case (final temperatures k B T ≥ 0.3m e c 2 ) triple interaction rates are fast enough to prevent the establishment of kinetic equilibrium. It is shown that thermalization process strongly depends on quantum degeneracy in initial state, but does not depend on plasma composition. (M. A. Prakapenia), siutsou@icranet.org (I. A. Siutsou), veresh@icra.it (G. V. Vereshchagin) 1 https://eli-laser.eu/ 2

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“…When repeatedly occurring, these processes may lead to an avalanche-like pair density growth, similar to avalanche gas breakdown, leading to development of the so-called QED cascades [33]. This dynamics may lead to formation of localized highly absorbing pair density distribution efficiently converting laser source energy into highly energetic gamma photons and charged particles, thus it can be treated as a source of antimatter (positrons), extremely dense electron-positron plasma, highly energetic electron bunches and photons [6,7,34,35].…”

Section: An Overview Of the Quantum Electrodynamics Particlein-cell Mmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploiting Parallelism on Shared Memory in the QED Particle-in-Cell Code PICADOR with Greedy Load Balancing

Meyerov

Панов

Bastrakov

et al. 2020

Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics

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State-of-the-art numerical simulations of laser plasma by means of the Particle-in-Cell method are often extremely computationally intensive. Therefore there is a growing need for development of approaches for efficient utilization of resources of modern supercomputers. In this paper, we address the problem of a substantially non-uniform and dynamically varying distribution of macroparticles in a computational area in simulating quantum electrodynamic (QED) cascades. We propose and evaluate a load balancing scheme for shared memory systems, which allows subdividing individual cells of the computational domain into work portions with subsequent dynamic distribution of these portions between OpenMP threads. Computational experiments on 1D, 2D, and 3D QED simulations show that the proposed scheme outperforms the previously developed standard and custom schemes in the PICADOR code by 2.1 to 10 times when employing several Intel Cascade Lake CPUs.

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Extreme plasma states in laser-governed vacuum breakdown

Cited by 37 publications

References 48 publications

Laser-driven plasma pinching in e−e+ cascade

Laser-driven plasma pinching in e−e+ cascade

Thermalization of electron–positron plasma with quantum degeneracy

Exploiting Parallelism on Shared Memory in the QED Particle-in-Cell Code PICADOR with Greedy Load Balancing

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