A Fast Particle Tracking Tool for the Simulation of Dielectric Laser Accelerators

8th International Particle Accelerator Conference, IPAC17, Copenhagen, Denmark, 15 May 2017 - 19 May 2017 ; Geneva : JACoW, 3716-3719(2017). doi:10.18429/JACoW-IPAC2017-THPAB013
In order to simulate the beam dynamics in grating based Dielectric Laser Accelerators (DLA) fully self-consistent PIC codes are usually employed. These codes model the evolution of both the electromagnetic fields inside a laser-driven DLA and the beam phase space very accurately. The main drawback of these codes is that they are computationally very expensive. While the simulation of a single DLA period is feasible with these codes, long multi-period structures cannot be studied without access to HPC clusters. We present a fast particle tracking tool for the simulation of long DLA structures. DLATracker is a parallelized code based on the analytical reconstruction of the in-channel electromagnetic fields and a Boris/Vay-type particle pusher. It computational kernel is written in OpenCL and can run on both CPUs and GPUs. The main code is following a modular approach and is written in Python 2.7. This way the code can be easiliy extended for different use cases. In order to benchmark the code, simulation results are compared to results obtained with the PIC code VSim 7.2.
Published by JACoW, Geneva