A Magnetic Mirror

Last updated on 2025-04-22 | Edit this page

Estimated time: 12 minutes

Overview

Questions

🪞 How to simulate the dynamics of charged particles in an external field?

Objectives

🏃 Run and 👀 visualize some protons in a magnetic mirror!

Setup

In this example we will simulate a bunch of protons inside a magnetic mirror machine. The protons are initialized with random positions and velocities. The magnetic field is loaded from a .h5 file. Make sure to download the input file.

Whenever you need to prepare an input file, this is where you want to go. By the way, analytics tell us that this is the most popular page of the documentation 👠!

Let’s take a look at the input file

OUTPUT

##########################
# USER-DEFINED CONSTANTS #
##########################
my_constants.Lx = 2 # [m]
my_constants.Ly = 2 # [m]
my_constants.Lz = 5 # [m]
my_constants.dt = 4.4e-7 # [s]
my_constants.Np = 1000

############
# NUMERICS #
############
geometry.dims = 3
geometry.prob_hi =  0.5*Lx  0.5*Ly Lz
geometry.prob_lo = -0.5*Lx -0.5*Ly 0
amr.n_cell = 40 40 40
max_step = 500
warpx.const_dt = dt

##############
# ALGORITHMS #
##############
algo.particle_shape = 1
amr.max_level = 0
warpx.do_electrostatic = labframe
warpx.grid_type = collocated
warpx.serialize_initial_conditions = 0
warpx.use_filter = 0

##############
# BOUNDARIES #
##############
boundary.field_hi = pec pec pec
boundary.field_lo = pec pec pec
boundary.particle_hi = absorbing absorbing absorbing
boundary.particle_lo = absorbing absorbing absorbing

#############
# PARTICLES #
#############
particles.species_names = protons
protons.charge = q_e
protons.mass = m_p
protons.do_not_deposit = 1 # test particles
protons.initialize_self_fields = 0
protons.injection_style = gaussian_beam
protons.x_rms = 0.1*Lx
protons.y_rms = 0.1*Ly
protons.z_rms = 0.1*Lz
protons.x_m = 0.
protons.y_m = 0.
protons.z_m = 0.5*Lz
protons.npart = Np
protons.q_tot = q_e*Np
protons.momentum_distribution_type = uniform
protons.ux_min = -9.5e-05
protons.uy_min = -9.5e-05
protons.uz_min = -0.000134
protons.ux_max = 9.5e-05
protons.uy_max = 9.5e-05
protons.uz_max = 0.000134

##########
# FIELDS #
##########
# field here is applied on directly the particles!
particles.B_ext_particle_init_style = read_from_file
particles.read_fields_from_path = example-femm-3d.h5

###############
# DIAGNOSTICS #
###############
diagnostics.diags_names = diag1
diag1.diag_type = Full
diag1.fields_to_plot = Bx By Bz
diag1.format = openpmd
diag1.intervals = 1
diag1.proton.variables = ux uy uz w x y z
diag1.species = protons
diag1.write_species = 1

A few notable details:

The protons are test particles because of the parameter protons.do_not_deposit=1. This means that the protons do not deposit their current density, therefore they do not contribute to the fields.
The magnetic field is applied directly to the particles with the particles.B_ext_particle_init_style flag, so in principle the grid is not used at all. For technical reasons, we must define a grid nonetheless.

Now that we have an idea of what the input files looks like, let’s set up our environment. Activate the warpx environment if you need to. Create a new directory with your own copy of the input file. Also, don’t forget to download the field file and place it in the directory where you will run the input.

Run

Let’s run the code

How would you do it? 🤷

Show me the solution

BASH

warpx.3d inputs_3d_magnetic_mirror.txt

As simple as that! 😉

You should see a standard output flashing out a lot of info.
At the end, you should find in your folder:

a subfolder called diags: here is where the code stored the diagnostics
a file called warpx_used_inputs: this is a summary of the inputs that were used to run the simulation

If that’s the case, yey! 💯

If the run went wrong, you may find a Backtrace.0.0 file which can be useful for debugging purposes. Let me know if the code fails in any way!

Here we have loaded the field of hte magnetic bottle from a file. You can also you can define an external field analytically.

Visualize

With Python 🐍

Now that we have the results, we can analyze them using Python.
We will use the openPMD-viewer library to grab the data that the simulation produced in openPMD format. Here you can find a few great tutorials on how to use the viewer. If you feel nerdy and/or you need to deal with the data in parallel workflows, you can use the openPMD-api.

As an example for the magnetic bottle simulation, we have developed simple Jupyter notebook where we retrieve the magnetic field and the particle attributes at the end of the simulation. With a little bit more work, we also plot the trajectories of the particles.

Let’s take a look at the Jupyter notebook

You can download the notebook and try it yourself. Remember to either run the notebook from the simulation directory or change the corresponding path in the notebook.

With Paraview

Now it’s time to produce some pretty cool images and videos! 😎 If you don’t have it, you can download Paraview here. In the diags/diag1 directory you should find a file named paraview.pmd: Paraview can read .pmd files. Just open Paraview and from there open the .pmd file. You should see Meshes and Particles in your pipeline browser (usually on the left). We can zhuzh up the pipeline so that we can visualize the trajectories of the protons in time

This is the pipeline that I have used to produce the visualizations below.

simulation of proton trajectories inside a magnetic mirror

If you make any other 3D visualization with this data, let me know! We can add it here 😉!

And that’s all for now! 👋

Key Points

💡 The external B field is loaded from an openPMD file, while the protons are defined as test particles.

📷 To analyze and visualize the simulation results in openPMD format, you can use the openPMD-viewer library for Python or you can open .pmd files directly in Paraview.