Laser-solid interaction

[berceanu]

Hi all,

Can Castro be used to model the plasma formed by the interaction of a high power, ultra-short laser with a solid target of given geometry and atomic composition?

If so, what would be a good starting point? Also, what are some of the main differences wrt FLASH for this use-case?

Thanks!
Andrei

[zingale]

Castro and Flash use similar algorithms. The main difference is the AMR and time-integration strategies. For your problem, how radiation is treated may also be important. Do you need to include the effects of radiation? or do you wish to start with just a lot of energy deposited in a region and then watch the interaction.

We don't support complex geometries. But it sounds like you would have a target of one composition inside the domain of a different composition? Is that correct?

[berceanu]

By radiation here do you mean laser radiation or secondary emission from the target? To get a better idea of the physics involved, a common setup is a structured nanotube target (with or without a substrate) placed in vacuum and irradiated by a high power laser.

The laser intensity can go up to 10^17 W/cm^2 and the irradiation time up to hundreds of picoseconds.

[maxpkatz]

He means do you need to directly model the laser radiation field in the simulation, or can it be indirectly modelled as a source term on the energy/temperature of the target without an explicit radiation field?

[berceanu]

We need to directly model it, for example in FLASH it is modeled using a ray tracing approach iirc.

https://flash.rochester.edu/site/flashcode/user_support/tutorial_talks/RAL_May2012/lasermgd.pdf

[zingale]

we do not have such a module, but would welcome a contribution.