Boundary conditions for arbitrarily shaped and tightly focused laser pulses in electromagnetic codes

Illia Thiele (1) , Stefan Skupin (1) , Rachel Nuter (1)

1 CELIA - Centre d'Etudes Lasers Intenses et Applications

Investigation of laser matter interaction with electromagnetic codes requires to implement sources for the electromagnetic fields. A way to do so is to prescribe the fields at the numerical box boundaries in order to achieve the desired fields inside the numerical box. Here we show that the often used paraxial approximation can lead to unexpected field profiles with strong impact on the laser matter interaction results. We propose an efficient numerical algorithm to compute the required laser boundary conditions consistent with the Maxwell's equations for arbitrarily shaped, tightly focused laser pulses.

Mots clés: tight focusing; vector beams; particle-in-cell (PIC) codes; Maxwell solver; electromagnetic codes

Domaines: Optique [physics.optics]; Physique Atomique [physics.atom-ph]; Physique des plasmas [physics.plasm-ph]

Illia Thiele, Stefan Skupin, Rachel Nuter. Boundary conditions for arbitrarily shaped and tightly focused laser pulses in electromagnetic codes. Journal of Computational Physics, 2016, 321, pp.1110. ⟨10.1016/j.jcp.2016.06.004⟩. ⟨hal-01235351⟩