First fully kinetic three-dimensional simulation of the AWAKE baseline scenario

Abstract

The "Advanced Proton Driven Plasma Wakefield Acceleration Experiment" (AWAKE) aims to accelerate leptons via proton-beam-driven wakefield acceleration. It comprises extensive numerical studies as well as experiments at the CERN laboratory. The baseline scenario incorporates a plasma volume of approximately $62\,\mathrm{cm}^3$. The plasma wavelength is about $1.25\,\mathrm{mm}$ and needs to be adequately resolved, using a minimum of $130$ points per plasma wavelength, in order to accurately reproduce the physics. The baseline scenario incorporates the proton beam micro-bunching, the concurrent non-linear wakefield growth as well as the off-axis electron beam injection, trapping and acceleration. We present results for the first three-dimensional simulation of this baseline scenario with a full model, using a sufficient resolution. The simulation consumed about $22\,\mathrm{Mch}$ of computer resources and scaled up to 32768 cores, thanks to a multitude of adaptions, improvements and optimization of the simulation code PSC. Through this large-scale simulation effort we were able to verify the results of reduced-model simulations as well as identify important novel effects during the electron injection process.