QuickPIC: a parallelized quasi-static PIC code for modeling plasma wakefield acceleration

There has been much recent interest in plasma wakefield acceleration. This is partly due to the possibility of using it as an energy doubler, i.e., an afterburner, stage at the end of an existing linear collider such as SLC. The process in this scheme is highly nonlinear and therefore particle models are required to study it. Furthermore, the key physics involves fully three-dimensional effects. Unfortunately, even on the largest computers it is still not possible to model a full energy doubler stage using existing codes such as OSIRIS. Fortunately however, for these cases the drive beam evolves on a much longer time scale than the plasma frequency. In these cases the beam appears static or frozen for long periods of time. Under these conditions one can make the quasi-static or frozen field approximation. We have recently developed a skeleton version of a parallelized quasi-static PIC code for modeling particle beam drivers. This code combines all the best features from WAKE and the work of D.H. Whittum (1997); and it is fully parallelized. We describe the basic equations and the algorithm. We will also present preliminary results, which include benchmarking it against our fully explicit code OSIRIS.