A publication of the Office of Advanced Simulation & Computing, NA-121.2, NNSA Defense Programs
March 2008
NA-ASC-500-08—Issue 6
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Lin Yin is one of the more prolific and successful users of the VPIC kinetic plasma modeling code. A technical staff member in Plasma Theory and Applications section of the Applied Science and Methods Development Group of the Applied Physics Division (X-Division) at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Lin has led the VPIC verification and validation effort. She has done high-impact PIC modeling in several settings, including electron sources in x-ray radiography, laser plasma interaction, laser-ion accelerators, magnetic reconnection, collisionless shocks, and kinetic Alfvén waves. She is the point of contact for laser-plasma interaction kinetic modeling at LANL, where she serves as liaison between the laser-plasma experimental and modeling teams.
Lin received her Ph.D. in Plasma Physics from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1998. Lin came to LANL as a Director-Funded Postdoctoral Fellow in 1999 and became a technical staff member in 2001. She won DOE and NNSA Defense Programs Awards of Excellence in 2004 and 2006 for her work in kinetic plasma modeling in service of programmatic objectives. She is a highly accomplished scientist, having published over 50 peer-reviewed journal publications, and she is a Principal Investigator of numerous projects in kinetic plasma research.
New physics insight has been gained from recent large-scale 3-D VPIC simulations on the base system of Roadrunner by the VPIC team. These simulations use over 170 x 109 particles and 14 x 109 grids, 10 times larger than those possible before Roadrunner, and are the largest plasma particle-in-cell simulations to date.
On the full Roadrunner machine, the VPIC team expects to be able to do PIC simulations with a trillion particles at a significant fraction of the theoretical 1 PFLOPS maximum. That would be six times larger than the current state of the art (and 100 times larger than what is typical) in the plasma physics community. Roadrunner will enable VPIC simulations at a size thought to be impossible only a few years ago, simulations of unprecedented fidelity that will drive discovery and push the boundaries of exploration in areas such as thermonuclear burn, laser-plasma interaction, ion source generation, and space and astrophysics applications.
VPIC simulation of backward Stimulated Raman Scattering (SRS) in the kinetic regime. Iso-surfaces of longitudinal electrostatic field show filament structures resulting from trapped particle modulational instability and self-focusing of electron plasma waves [2], the key physics underlying nonlinear SRS saturation. The laser is launched from the simulation geometry near face.
[1] K.J. Bowers, B.J. Albright, L. Yin, B. Bergen, and T.J.T. Kwan, “Ultrahigh performance three-dimensional electromagnetic relativistic kinetic plasma simulation,” Phys. Plasmas 15, 055703, (March 5, 2008).
[2] L. Yin, B. J. Albright, K. J. Bowers, W. Daughton, H. Rose, “Saturation of Backward Stimulated Scattering of a Laser Beam in the Kinetic Regime,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 265004 (2007).
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