We developed an advanced radiation diagnostic that captures radiation emission at run time in particle-in-cell codes. This tool solves the radiated electric and magnetic fields in space and in time and therefore includes built-in temporal and spatial coherence effects. This feature gives access to the spatio-temporal radiation profile from a collection of many light emitting particles. These features yield much interesting, exciting and important physics, which is nevertheless yet to be explored and understood.
RaDiO is particularly useful in capturing the radiation from relativistic particles because this limit maximizes the disparity between the radiated frequency and the typical time-scale for the particle trajectories. We can thus capture radiation emission in this limit by only resolving the typical time-scales for the particle motion in particle-in-cell simulations.
See below a pedagogical demonstration of how it works by Miguel Pardal, who is leading the efforts in this project.