General features


  • Source code written in Fortran 90.

  • Domain decomposition with the Message Passing Interface (MPI) in 1D, 2D, and 3D.

  • Maxwell's equations are solved with the Yee finite-different time-domain (FDTD) algorithm (Yee, 1966).

  • Newton's equation is solved with the Boris FDTD algorithm (Birdsall & Langdon, 2005).

  • The radiation reaction force includes synchrotron and inverse Compton back-reaction force (in the Thomson regime only). The Abraham-Lorentz-Dirac equation is solved using a modified Boris push (Tamburini et al. 2010).

  • The numerical scheme does not strictly conserve electric charge, but the electric field is corrected by solving the Poisson's equation using an iterative Gauss-Seidel method.

  • Default boundary conditions: Periodic or perfect conductor for the fields; Periodic, absorbing, or reflecting boundaries for the particles.

  • Variable weight for the macro-particles.

  • Parallel/serial dumping of data in HDF5, or simply in txt format.

  • Check-pointing and restarting capabilities.

  • Optional isotropic digital spatial filtering of the currents or fields, using neighboring points.

  • Particle tracker.

  • Large set of analysis tools: plasma density, particle spectrum, optically thin synchrotron and inverse Compton spectra, angular distributions, stress-energy tensor.