Henri Vincenti

Attosecond lighthouses: how to use spatiotemporally coupled light fields to generate isolated attosecond pulses.

We show how to use spatio-temporally coupled light fields to generate isolated attosecond pulses. This general effect provides a very convenient scheme for attosecond pump-probe experiments, and constitutes a powerful new tool for ultrafast metrology.

Applications of ultrafast wavefront rotation in highly nonlinear optics

This paper provides an overview of ultrafast wavefront rotation of femtosecond laser pulses and its various applications in highly nonlinear optics, focusing on processes that lead to the generation of high-order harmonics and attosecond pulses. In this context, wavefront rotation can be exploited in different ways, to obtain new light sources for time-resolved studies, called ‘attosecond lighthouses’, to perform time-resolved measurements of nonlinear optical processes, using ‘photonic streaking’, or to track changes in the carrier–envelope relative phase of femtosecond laser pulses. The basic principles are explained qualitatively from different points of view, the experimental evidence obtained so far is summarized, and the perspectives opened by these effects are discussed.

Optical properties of relativistic plasma mirrors

The advent of ultrahigh-power femtosecond lasers creates a need for an entirely new class of optical components based on plasmas. The most promising of these are known as plasma mirrors, formed when an intense femtosecond laser ionizes a solid surface. These mirrors specularly reflect the main part of a laser pulse and can be used as active optical elements to manipulate its temporal and spatial properties. Unfortunately, the considerable pressures exerted by the laser can deform the mirror surface, unfavourably affecting the reflected beam and complicating, or even preventing, the use of plasma mirrors at ultrahigh intensities. Here we derive a simple analytical model of the basic physics involved in laser-induced deformation of a plasma mirror. We validate this model numerically and experimentally, and use it to show how such deformation might be mitigated by appropriate control of the laser phase.

Applying the Roofline Performance Model to the Intel Xeon Phi Knights Landing Processor

The Roofline Performance Model is a visually intuitive method used to bound the sustained peak floating-point performance of any given arithmetic kernel on any given processor architecture. In the Roofline, performance is nominally measured in floating-point operations per second as a function of arithmetic intensity (operations per byte of data). In this study we determine the Roofline for the Intel Knights Landing (KNL) processor, determining the sustained peak memory bandwidth and floating-point performance for all levels of the memory hierarchy, in all the different KNL cluster modes. We then determine arithmetic intensity and performance for a suite of application kernels being targeted for the KNL based supercomputer Cori, and make comparisons to current Intel Xeon processors. Cori is the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center’s (NERSC) next generation supercomputer. Scheduled for deployment mid-2016, it will be one of the earliest and largest KNL deployments in the world.

Vacuum laser acceleration of relativistic electrons using plasma mirror injectors

We report the first experimental observation of Vacuum Laser Acceleration of electrons to relativistic energies, by using a plasma mirror to inject electrons in an ultraintense laser field, and thus produce 10 MeV multi-nC bunches.

Evaluating and optimizing the NERSC workload on Knights Landing

NERSC has partnered with 20 representative application teams to evaluate performance on the Xeon-Phi Knights Landing architecture and develop an application-optimization strategy for the greater NERSC workload on the recently installed Cori system. In this article, we present early case studies and summarized results from a subset of the 20 applications highlighting the impact of important architecture differences between the Xeon-Phi and traditional Xeon processors. We summarize the status of the applications and describe the greater optimization strategy that has formed.

Detailed analysis of the effects of stencil spatial variations with arbitrary high-order finite-difference Maxwell solver

Very high order or pseudo-spectral Maxwell solvers are the method of choice to reduce discretization effects (e.g. numerical dispersion) that are inherent to low order Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) schemes. However, due to their large stencils, these solvers are often subject to truncation errors in many electromagnetic simulations. These truncation errors come from non-physical modifications of Maxwell’s equations in space that may generate spurious signals affecting the overall accuracy of the simulation results. Such modifications for instance occur when Perfectly Matched Layers (PMLs) are used at simulation domain boundaries to simulate open media. Another example is the use of arbitrary order Maxwell solver with domain decomposition technique that may under some condition involve stencil truncations at subdomain boundaries, resulting in small spurious errors that do eventually build up. In each case, a careful evaluation of the characteristics and magnitude of the errors resulting from these approximations, and their impact at any frequency and angle, requires detailed analytical and numerical studies. To this end, we present a general analytical approach that enables the evaluation of numerical errors of fully three-dimensional arbitrary order finite-difference Maxwell solver, with arbitrary modification of the local stencil in the simulation domain. The analytical model is validated against simulations of domain decomposition technique and PMLs, when these are used with very high-order Maxwell solver, as well as in the infinite order limit of pseudo-spectral solvers. Results confirm that the new analytical approach enables exact predictions in each case. It also confirms that the domain decomposition technique can be used with very high-order Maxwell solvers and a reasonably low number of guard cells with negligible effects on the whole accuracy of the simulation.

An efficient and portable SIMD algorithm for charge/current deposition in Particle-In-Cell codes ☆

Author(s): Vincenti, H; Lobet, M; Lehe, R; Sasanka, R; Vay, JL | Abstract:

Accurate modeling of plasma acceleration with arbitrary order pseudo-spectral particle-in-cell methods

Particle in Cell (PIC) simulations are a widely used tool for the investigation of both laser- and beam-driven plasma acceleration. It is a known issue that the beam quality can be artificially degraded by numerical Cherenkov radiation (NCR) resulting primarily from an incorrectly modeled dispersion relation. Pseudo-spectral solvers featuring infinite order stencils can strongly reduce NCR—or even suppress it—and are therefore well suited to correctly model the beam properties. For efficient parallelization of the PIC algorithm, however, localized solvers are inevitable. Arbitrary order pseudo-spectral methods provide this needed locality. Yet, these methods can again be prone to NCR. Here, we show that acceptably low solver orders are sufficient to correctly model the physics of interest, while allowing for parallel computation by domain decomposition.

WarpIV: In Situ Visualization and Analysis of Ion Accelerator Simulations

The generation of short pulses of ion beams through the interaction of an intense laser with a plasma sheath offers the possibility of compact and cheaper ion sources for many applications--from fast ignition and radiography of dense targets to hadron therapy and injection into conventional accelerators. To enable the efficient analysis of large-scale, high-fidelity particle accelerator simulations using the Warp simulation suite, the authors introduce the Warp In situ Visualization Toolkit (WarpIV). WarpIV integrates state-of-the-art in situ visualization and analysis using VisIt with Warp, supports management and control of complex in situ visualization and analysis workflows, and implements integrated analytics to facilitate query- and feature-based data analytics and efficient large-scale data analysis. WarpIV enables for the first time distributed parallel, in situ visualization of the full simulation data using high-performance compute resources as the data is being generated by Warp. The authors describe the application of WarpIV to study and compare large 2D and 3D ion accelerator simulations, demonstrating significant differences in the acceleration process in 2D and 3D simulations. WarpIV is available to the public via https://bitbucket.org/berkeleylab/warpiv. The Warp In situ Visualization Toolkit (WarpIV) supports large-scale, parallel, in situ visualization and analysis and facilitates query- and feature-based analytics, enabling for the first time high-performance analysis of large-scale, high-fidelity particle accelerator simulations while the data is being generated by the Warp simulation suite. This supplemental material https://extras.computer.org/extra/mcg2016030022s1.pdf provides more details regarding the memory profiling and optimization and the Yee grid recentering optimization results discussed in the main article.