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Automatic beam path analysis of laser wakefield particle acceleration data

Oliver Rübel1,2,3, Cameron G R Geddes4, Estelle Cormier-Michel4, Kesheng Wu1, Prabhat1, Gunther H Weber1, Daniela M Ushizima1, Peter Messmer5, Hans Hagen2, Bernd Hamann1,2,3 and Wes Bethel1,3

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Numerical simulations of laser wakefield particle accelerators play a key role in the understanding of the complex acceleration process and in the design of expensive experimental facilities. As the size and complexity of simulation output grows, an increasingly acute challenge is the practical need for computational techniques that aid in scientific knowledge discovery. To that end, we present a set of data-understanding algorithms that work in concert in a pipeline fashion to automatically locate and analyze high-energy particle bunches undergoing acceleration in very large simulation datasets. These techniques work cooperatively by first identifying features of interest in individual timesteps, then integrating features across timesteps, and based on the information-derived perform analysis of temporally dynamic features. This combination of techniques supports accurate detection of particle beams enabling a deeper level of scientific understanding of physical phenomena than has been possible before. By combining efficient data analysis algorithms and state-of-the-art data management we enable high-performance analysis of extremely large particle datasets in 3D. We demonstrate the usefulness of our methods for a variety of 2D and 3D datasets and discuss the performance of our analysis pipeline.


PACS

52.38.Kd Laser-plasma acceleration of electrons and ions

41.75.Fr Electron and positron beams

41.85.Ct Particle beam shaping, beam splitting

29.27.Eg Beam handling; beam transport

29.20.-c Accelerators

MSC

78A60 Lasers, masers, optical bistability, nonlinear optics (See also 81V80)

68P05 

82D10 Plasmas

Subjects

Accelerators, beams and electromagnetism

Nuclear physics

Instrumentation and measurement

Optics, quantum optics and lasers

Plasma physics

Particle physics and field theory

Dates

Issue 1 (January-December 2009)

Received 15 July 2009, in final form 20 October 2009

Published 18 November 2009



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