HiPACE: a quasi-static particle-in-cell code

We introduce the Highly efficient Plasma Accelerator Emulation (HiPACE) code. It is a relativistic, electromagnetic, three-dimensional and fully parallelized particle-in-cell (PIC) code and uses the quasi-static approximation to efficiently simulate a variety of beam-driven plasma-wakefield acceleration scenarios. HiPACE exploits the disparity of time scales in the interaction of highly relativistic particle beams with plasma to decouple beam and plasma evolution. This enables time steps which are many times greater than those used in full PIC codes. Comparisons to the fully explicit PIC code OSIRIS show the capability of the quasi-static PIC code to consistently simulate problems in beam-driven plasma acceleration while reducing the required number of core hours by orders of magnitude. This work outlines the physical basis, describes the numerical implementation and assesses the parallel performance of the code which in combination lead to high computational efficiency.