Influence of backstreaming ions from the target on spot size of focused 2 MeV electron beam was considered. The 2D version of the particle-in-cell code KARAT was used to study the formation of the ions stream and dynamics of the electron beam. It was shown that light species emitted from the target can disrupt the beam. The emission of low-ionized states of tantalum cannot disrupt the beam during about 30 ns or longer. A few non-invasive techniques of mitigation of the beam disruption were considered. Final magnetic lens with fast variation of magnetic field of several hundred Ampere-turns per nanosecond is capable to stabilize initial spot size of the compressed beam at the target.

High-order interpolation algorithms for charge conservation in Particle-in-Cell (PIC) simulations are presented. The methods are valid for the case that a particle trajectory is a zigzag line. The second-order and third-order algorithms which can be applied to any even-order and odd-order are discussed in this paper, respectively. Several test simulations are performed to demonstrate their validity in two-dimensional PIC code. Compared with the simulation results of one-order, high-order algorithms have advantages in computation precision and enlarging the grid scales which reduces the CPU time.

In the first part, the theoretical model of the stochastic heating effect is presented briefly. Then, a numerical resolution of the Hamilton equations highlights the threshold of the stochastic effect. Finally, Particle-In-Cell (PIC) code simulations results, for experimentally relevant parameters, are presented in order to confirm the acceleration mechanism predicted by the one-particle theoretical model. This paper gives the conditions on the different experimental parameters in order to have an optimization of the stochastic heating.