Simulation of Laser Plasma Filamentation Using Adaptive Mesh Refinement

We investigate the use of adaptive mesh refinement in the simulation of laser plasma filamentation. A numerical algorithm is constructed to solve model equations consisting of a fluid approximation of a quasineutral plasma combined with a paraxial light propagation model. The algorithm involves high-resolution plasma and light model discretizations on a block-structured, locally refined grid hierarchy, which is dynamically modified during the time integration to follow evolving fine-scale solution features. Comparisons of the efficiency of this approach to that of uniform grid calculations are presented.