Can shock be included in WarpX?

[deSUBHAM]

I want to study the affect of shock in collisionless plasma. For example, I want to study the acceleration of electrons and ions as they encounter shock, i.e., particle acceleration during diffusive shock acceleration. Can I use WarpX in that case? Is there any example for that? Thank you.

[deSUBHAM]

It would be very nice if anyone help me out here by referring example(s) and/or reference(s) where shock is captured in WarpX. That would be much appreciated. Thank you.

[ax3l]

Hi @deSUBHAM,

Thank you for the question!

Yes, it is absolutely possible to study collisionless plasma shocks with WarpX. We just have not created an example yet, but we could guide you and you develop and contribute one?

Can you tell us a bit more about the way you like to model your scenario, in terms of initial conditions and boundary conditions? Feel free to provide a high level sketch about the example you like to model and see documented.

To start, you just need to set the appropriate initial plasma conditions to launch your shock, e.g., from a laser-plasma or colliding neutral plasma slabs. Use the usual plasma species inputs and their velocity options for that. You might also find the NFluxPerCell / do_continuous_injection options useful to continuously feed in new particles on one end of the simulation.
If you need a non-neutral starting condition, then we have an initial Poisson solver for a (currently singular) medium beta for moving plasmas.

Another thing I imagine you will need are specific boundary conditons, e.g. open on one end (e.g. PML), periodic on the transverse axis and reflecting on the upper boundary? Our boundary.particle_lo/hi and field boundaries support this as well, but let us know if you find something missing.