Design and Simulation of Plasma Channels via Magnetohydrodynamic Modeling

Structured plasma systems can serve as important tools for novel particle acceleration schemes, including as sources for plasma-based accelerators and as active plasma lenses for high brightness beams. Modeling these systems is challenging, owing to the orders of magnitude disparities in the spatiotemporal scale lengths between the beam or laser and the background plasma evolution. We discuss the application of the FLASH code, a publicly available radiation magnetohydrodynamics software, to model capillary discharges for use as laser plasma acceleration stages and as active plasma lenses. We discuss the impact that the choice of electron transport model has on the system evolution, and demonstrate the effect of novel anistropic models on the model outcomes [1]. We also consider sensitivites to different inputs, including initial conditions and the applicaton of a laser heater. Finally we discuss initial work to explore the modeling of hydrodynamic optical-field-ionized plasmas, which show promise for future meter-scale plasma accelerator sources [2], [3].