Review of
"Beyond the ponderomotive limit: Direct laser acceleration of relativistic electrons in sub-critical plasmas"

Review of "Beyond the ponderomotive limit: Direct laser acceleration of relativistic electrons in sub-critical plasmas"

Submitted by anndra27  

March 31, 2022, 10:57 a.m.

Lead reviewer

anndra27

Review Body

Reproducibility

Did you manage to reproduce it?
Fully Reproducible
Reproducibility rating
How much of the paper did you manage to reproduce?
4 / 10
Briefly describe the procedure followed/tools used to reproduce it

Particle-in-cell code EPOCH used to reproduce figure 1 plots using simulation details given in appendix. Python used for reading SDF files, processing and visualising data.

Briefly describe your familiarity with the procedure/tools used by the paper.

Vaguely familiar with EPOCH

Which type of operating system were you working in?
High Performance Computing Cluster
What additional software did you need to install?

EPOCH code and SDF submodule

What software did you use

EPOCH, SDF helper, Python, Gfortran, OpenMPI, Matplotlib

What were the main challenges you ran into (if any)?

No real challenges in reproducing figure 1

What were the positive features of this approach?

Once input deck setup and visualisation script written not much human effort required to tweak and see effect.

Any other comments/suggestions on the reproducibility approach?

Documentation

Documentation rating
How well was the material documented?
9 / 10
How could the documentation be improved?

xmin and xmax of the simulation were not given explicitly, although they could be roughly inferred from the limits of figure 1

What do you like about the documentation?

Every other simulation detail given explicitly in appendix which allowed easy reproduction

After attempting to reproduce, how familiar do you feel with the code and methods used in the paper?
6 / 10
Any suggestions on how the analysis could be made more transparent?

Analysis pretty transparent, only time constraints stopped an attempt at reproducing later figures


Reusability

Reusability rating
Rate the project on reusability of the material
9 / 10
Permissive Data license included:  
Permissive Code license included:  

Any suggestions on how the project could be more reusable?

All input decks and analysis code made available



Any final comments

Given more time I feel the paper is fully reproducible and sufficient detail given to do so.