April 01, 2021
A Colloquium paper on atomistic simulations of channeling and radiation processes in oriented crystals, written by Andrei Korol, Gennady Sushko and Andrey V. Solov’yov, has been published in the European Physical Journal D [1].
The paper reviews recent achievements in numerical modeling of ultra-relativistic projectiles propagation in oriented crystals, radiation emission and related phenomena. This topic is highly relevant to designing novel gamma-ray light sources based on the exposure of oriented crystals to the beams of charged particles. Crystal-based light sources can generate radiation in the photon energy range where the technologies based on the fields of permanent magnets become inefficient or incapable.
Construction of novel crystal-based light sources is a very challenging task, which constitutes a highly interdisciplinary and broad field with numerical modelling being part of it. The authors focus on the approaches that allow for advanced computational exploration beyond the continuous potential and binary collisions frameworks. A detailed description of the multiscale all-atom relativistic molecular dynamics approach implemented in the MBN Explorer software package is given.
Several representative case studies related to ultra-relativistic projectiles channeling and calculation of the spectral intensities are presented. In most cases, the input data used in the simulations, such as crystal orientation and thickness, the bending radii, periods and amplitudes, and the energies of the projectiles, have been chosen to match the parameters used in the accomplished and the ongoing experiments.
For further details see
[1] A.V. Korol, G.B. Sushko, and A.V. Solov’yov, All-atom relativistic molecular dynamics simulations of channeling and radiation processes in oriented crystals, Eur. Phys. J. D 75 (2021) 107