IN SILICO PLASMA BASED ACCELERATORS

Plasma based accelerators hold the promise of providing a critical contribution to the next generation of particle accelerators due to the demonstrated high acceleration gradients. The recent outstanding progress in plasma based accelerators has relied on the strong interplay between theory, simulations, and experiments. Simulations of plasma based accelerators have played a critical role in many of the most important advances of the field and are one of the successful examples of petaflop scale computational sciences. I will review some of the recent advances in plasma based accelerators, both in experiments and in theory/simulations, the challenges and progress associated with in silico plasma based accelerators, e.g. algorithms, novel architectures, and some of the most promising new paths now being explored with massively parallel particle-in-cell simulations.