Laying a foundation for laser-plasma modeling for the national ignition facility Original Research Article

Three multi-dimensional plasma simulation models for simulating parametric instabilities occurring in laser-produced plasmas are presented. These models are based on a common framework, henceforth referred to as reduced-description, in which the electromagnetic field is represented by three separate temporal envelopes in order to model parametric instabilities with high-frequency and low-frequency daughter waves. Because the temporal envelope representation is used, the explicit dependence on the laser time scale is removed from the simulations models. The time step of the simulation is then restricted by either the electron timescale or the ion timescale, depending on whether parametric instabilities that result in high-frequency daughter waves are important. These simulation models are the basic building blocks of a comprehensive, ongoing model development program at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and have been implemented in multi-dimension on the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) parallel computer. Test simulations of stimulated Raman scattering (SRS), stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS), the Langmuir decay instability (LDI), and the interaction thereof, are presented.