Simulating tomorrow's accelerators at near the speed of light
Tuesday, March 22, 2011 - 11:30
in Physics & Chemistry
Borrowing a page from Albert Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity, scientists have perfected a way to accelerate modeling of laser-plasma wakefield accelerators up to a million times faster. While "tabletop" laser-plasma accelerators promise high energies in short spaces, 3-D simulation of electron acceleration by a laser beam moving through a plasma has presented a computational challenge that until now has been beyond practical solution by supercomputers.