IBMP3D: A particle-in-cell code for fast simulation of beam transport in plasmas

The study of beam–plasma interactions is important in many research fields, such as astrophysics, inertial confinement fusion, and high-energy density physics. Considering the significant impact of electromagnetic fields on the evolution of beam–plasma systems, comprehensive three-dimensional modeling of the system is needed. In this work, a relativistic three-dimensional electromagnetic particle-in-cell code IBMP3D is developed for the investigations of beam transport in plasmas. To save the computation time and achieve a fast simulation, a dynamic array data structure combined with particle sorting is designed in the code. Benchmarks between IBMP3D and the codes EPOCH and WarpX are presented for the transport of relativistic electron beams in plasmas, including the beam self-focusing effect, the excitation of the self-modulation, and current filamentation instabilities. While good agreements in the simulation results are found, a significant reduction in the computation time is achieved for the code IBMP3D.