Towards Atomic Physics in PIConGPU

Particle-in-Cell (PIC) codes are a ubiquitous tool to study laser-plasma physics in a fully relativistic environment. Theoretical models for plasma based accelerators and corresponding experiments, as planned by the HIBEF collaboration (XFEL), depend dramatically on the ability to precisely predict the complex processes inside of targets.

Unfortunately, basic atomic processes like the ionization dynamics of solid foil target in ultra-high fields of modern short-pulse laser systems in the PW class are not covered by the basic PIC algorithm. This talk shows ways to introduce the microscopic ionization dynamics inside the targets in a self-consistent and rigorous way. Combined with modern compute hardware such as GPUs and manycore systems in general, this paves the road to a new quality of multi-physics simulations with ab-initio modeling of atomic processes in strong laser fields.