Cockcroft Institute and Lancaster University Postdoctoral Research Associate, Dr John Scott, and co-investigators, Dr Elisabetta Boella (CI / Lancaster University), Dr Laura Corner (CI / University of Liverpool) and Dr Jorge Vieira (Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal), have recently been awarded a large resource allocation on a UK-based supercomputer.
Distributed Research utilising Advanced Computing (DiRAC) is the UK’s integrated supercomputing facility for theoretical modelling and HPC-based research in particle physics, astronomy and cosmology. Dr Scott has been granted 9 million CPU hours on DiRAC’s Extreme Scaling system, known as Tesseract, which is hosted at the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC). At a cost of £0.027 per CPU hour, this grant has a commercial value of £243,000.
Over the course of this year-long project, the team intends to utilise these resources to simulate laser plasma wakefield acceleration (LWFA), a novel form of particle acceleration in which a powerful laser drives oscillations within a plasma to produce electric field strengths three orders of magnitude greater than those possible in conventional accelerators. In particular, they will explore via numerical simulations the possibility of injecting an electron beam slightly pre-accelerated using conventional techniques into the wakefield structure, where the beam energy will be further boosted to highly relativistic values over only a few centimetres.
These results will greatly influence future studies into externally injected particle beams, a promising technique to produce high-quality electron beams and X-rays via LWFA. It also is the hope of the investigators that this project will highlight the technology’s potential applications in other areas of research, such as medical and industrial imaging.