Improving the accuracy of hard photon emission by sigmoid sampling of the quantum-electrodynamic table in particle-in-cell Monte Carlo simulations.

Abstract

Research on laser-plasma interaction in the quantum-electrodynamic (QED) regime has been greatly advanced by particle-in-cell and Monte Carlo simulations (PIC-MC). While these simulations are widely used, we find that a noticeable numerical error arises due to inappropriate implementation of the quantum process accounting for hard photon emission and pair production in the PIC-MC codes. The error stems from the low resolution of the QED table used to sample photon energy, which is generated in the logarithmic scale and cannot resolve high energy photons. We propose a sampling method via sigmoid function that handles both the low energy and high energy end of the photon emission spectrum. It guarantees the accuracy of PIC-MC algorithms for hard photon radiation and other related processes in the strong-field QED regime.