CHIMERA: a code for FEL and laser plasma simulations

by Igor A Andriyash (igor.andriyash@gmail.com)

CHIMERA is a relativistic electromagnetic particle-in-cell code, based on a quasi-cylindric pseudo-spectral analytical time domain (PSATD) Maxwell solver. More details on this method can be found in the original publications [<cite>1</cite>,<cite>2</cite>,<cite>3</cite>].

Installation

The code was tested only under Linux and MacOS. The recommended installation is through the Anaconda distribution. If Anaconda is not your default Python installation, download and install it from here.

• install the dependances:

conda install gcc scipy h5py
conda install -c conda-forge fftw

• clone the code source and cd into the folder (e.g. into ~/src/)

git clone https://github.com/hightower8083/chimera.git
cd chimera

• compile the Fortran 90 subroutines and install the code:

make
make install

• code may be uninstalled using:

make uninstall
make clean

• optionally, to enable export of synchrotron radiation data to VTK format install Mayavi (for tvtk api):

conda install vtk
pip install mayavi

NB:

• you may need to adapt Makefile for your installation of Anaconda and FFTW.
• you may need to heck the correct address to FFTW3 /lib/ and /bin/

Running

To run CHIMERA in multiprocessor mode specify the OMP_NUM_THREADS variable.

For more information see demos in ./doc/

References

[1] Igor A. Andriyash, Rémi Lehe and Agustin Lifschitz, Laser-plasma interactions with a Fourier-Bessel particle-in-cell method, Physics of Plasmas 23, 033110 (2016)

[2] Rémi Lehe, Manuel Kirchen, Igor A. Andriyash, Brendan B. Godfrey and Jean-Luc Vay, A spectral, quasi-cylindrical and dispersion-free Particle-In-Cell algorithm, Computer Physics Communications 203, 66 (2016)

[3] Igor A. Andriyash, Rémi Lehe and Victor Malka, A spectral unaveraged algorithm for free electron laser simulations, Journal of Computational Physics 282, 397 (2015)