Photo-Ionization of a Background Gas

[Nicola17]

Hey, I'm new to the field, and trying to understand with PIC simulator to experiment with (targeting to work on Neural PDE later).

I would like to simulate a the photo-ionization of a background gas (hydrogen), the interaction with some 3D geometry (chamber walls + extra metal components inside). Ideally also the gas flow in the chamber, and the simulation of metal charged particles in the chamber.

I looked at the API, and tried to implement some experiments in WarpX.
I don't see functionalities to support my use case above. I was wondering if I'm missing something, or if you can give me some guidance on where to look to!

Ty!

[ax3l]

Welcome to WarpX and thank you for reaching out!

This looks like you would use electrostatic modeling, where unfortunately we do not have photo-ionization effects yet implemented as you would need for modeling.

Field ionization effects that we model so far are implemented in our electromagnetic solver, using high-field approximations. (And we have collisional ionization effects.)

To add photo-ionization in electrostatic modeling to WarpX, one could add an explicit photon-ion particle-particle interaction with the right cross sections (we have multiple processes that are particle-particle interactions already in WarpX to base this on). One could add this directly into the C++ source code for speed or hook it into our Python APIs.

Are you interested in contributing this feature and need more guidance? We would then recommended to go the C++ way and look at processes we already have, like collisional physics and background MCC: https://github.com/ECP-WarpX/WarpX/tree/development/Source/Particles/Collision