Quantitative Comparison Between Reduced-Description Particle-in-Cell (RPIC) and full PIC Simulations of Laser-Plasma Instabilities

RPIC is a reduced-description particle-in-cell code designed to investigate laser-plasma instabilities in physical systems with vastly-different time scales prevalent under Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) conditions [1]. Such time scales include the laser, Langmuir, and ion acoustic time scales. In past literature, laser-plasma instability phenomena involving these disparate scales have mostly been studied with the extended Zakharov model. Recently, comparisons between the extended Zakharov model and the RPIC model were presented in a series of papers, Ref. [2-4], in which quantitative agreement between these two models are obtained in the fluid and quasi-linear regime. However, in the kinetic regime where electron and/or ion trapping is important, significant differences were found. These findings enunciate the importance for accurate modeling of kinetic processes such as trapping.