Using positions, moments, and fields obtained from the PIC simulations, structured as indicated in the previous section, it is possible to perform parallel calculation of the electric field signals produced by each trajectory on a detector at any given spatial position. The well-known expression for calculating the retarded fields takes the following form [
8]:
where
e is the charge of the electron,
c is the speed of light,
is the Lorentz factor,
R is the distance between the trajectory and the detector,
is the unit vector pointing from the trajectory to the detector, and
and
are the velocity and acceleration of the particle normalized to
c. Note that the given expression is valid in CGS units. Then, defining the quantity
and performing its Fourier transform on the detector
the differential intensity over frequency
and solid angle
is obtained as follows
where the dimensions of the last expression is [erg s]. In Eq.
1 and Eq.
2, the subscript
indicates that the field at point
at time
t must be evaluated by finding an appropriate value of
R that provides an intersection between the back-propagating light cone from point
and the trajectory of the particle. The values of the variables necessary for the field calculation should then be evaluated at time
, taking into account the signal propagation at velocity
c. This conventional "backward" approach allows us to
a grid of times
at which to evaluate the field on the detector and requires interpolating the trajectory at the points indicated by the reasoning just described, thus
a grid of times on the trajectory
(
Figure 2 a). In the case of relativistic particles, interpolating the trajectories is a delicate and potentially risky operation, as even small variations in quantities like
and
can lead to huge discrepancies in energy or even result in unphysical situations (like superluminal velocities). The "forward" approach used in the development of our code avoids interpolating the trajectories (preserving causality) and consists of evaluating the trajectory quantities only at the instants provided by the PIC simulation, thus
a grid of times on the trajectory
and
a grid of times on the detector
. Given the distance
R between trajectory and detector at each instant, the fields calculated with Eq.
1 will be associated with the time
(
Figure 2 b).
One of the advantages of the forward approach is its natural adaptability to the evolution of a numerical simulation. In the developments following this work, integrating this scheme directly into a PIC code will enable the reconstruction of the spectrum using complete information about trajectory evolution. Besides providing improved convergence of the Fourier integrals required for calculating spectral components, this operation will significantly reduce the amount of data to be saved during the simulation. The critical aspect of this approach concerns the temporal alignment of signals produced on the detector by different particles. Indeed, from
Figure 2 b, it is evident that adding a second trajectory that shares the same evenly spaced time grid (
) would result in different arrival times of the signal on the detector compared to those produced by the first trajectory (
) due to the particles’ different positions. Furthermore, changing the position of the detector may also alter the order in which the elements of
and
alternate. Thus, two approaches to spectrum calculation are outlined, each with different computational complexities and different levels of extracted information (
Figure 3):