Dan T. Abell

Simulations of Dynamical Friction Including Spatially‐Varying Magnetic Fields

A proposed luminosity upgrade to the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) includes a novel electron cooling section, which would use ∼55 MeV electrons to cool fully‐ionized 100 GeV/nucleon gold ions. We consider the dynamical friction force exerted on individual ions due to a relevant electron distribution. The electrons may be focussed by a strong solenoid field, with sensitive dependence on errors, or by a wiggler field. In the rest frame of the relativistic co‐propagating electron and ion beams, where the friction force can be simulated for nonrelativistic motion and electrostatic fields, the Lorentz transform of these spatially‐varying magnetic fields includes strong, rapidly‐varying electric fields. Previous friction force simulations for unmagnetized electrons or error‐free solenoids used a 4th‐order Hermite algorithm, which is not well‐suited for the inclusion of strong, rapidly‐varying external fields. We present here a new algorithm for friction force simulations, using an exact two‐body collis...

Petascale self-consistent electromagnetic computations using scalable and accurate algorithms for complex structures

As the size and cost of particle accelerators escalate, high-performance computing plays an increasingly important role; optimization through accurate, detailed computermodeling increases performance and reduces costs. But consequently, computer simulations face enormous challenges. Early approximation methods, such as expansions in distance from the design orbit, were unable to supply detailed accurate results, such as in the computation of wake fields in complex cavities. Since the advent of message-passing supercomputers with thousands of processors, earlier approximations are no longer necessary, and it is now possible to compute wake fields, the effects of dampers, and self-consistent dynamics in cavities accurately. In this environment, the focus has shifted towards the development and implementation of algorithms that scale to large numbers of processors. So-called charge-conserving algorithms evolve the electromagnetic fields without the need for any global solves (which are difficult to scale up to many processors). Using cut-cell (or embedded) boundaries, these algorithms can simulate the fields in complex accelerator cavities with curved walls. New implicit algorithms, which are stable for any time-step, conserve charge as well, allowing faster simulation of structures with details small compared to the characteristic wavelength. These algorithmic and computational advances have been implemented in the VORPAL7 Framework, a flexible, object-oriented, massively parallel computational application that allows run-time assembly of algorithms and objects, thus composing an application on the fly.

Select Advances in Computational Accelerator Physics

Computational accelerator physics has changed and broadened over the last decade or so. Part of the change is due to the advent of multiple ways of parallel computing. Another part comes from algorithmic developments. The multiple ways of parallel computing include distributed memory parallelism and on-chip parallelism, with the latter coming from architectures (CPU and GPU) having multiple processing elements (cores or streaming multiprocessors) and wide vector (SIMD) instruction units. The basics of these new architectures and their application to computational accelerator physics are briefly reviewed. Algorithmic advances in the select areas of spin tracking, cavity calculations, plasma acceleration, and electron cooling are also reviewed. In some cases the algorithms provide increased fidelity improving the overall accuracy, while in other cases, such as controlled dispersion, the algorithms provide increased fidelity by better modeling the essential physical interaction. Finally, the use of computational frameworks, which provide the basic computational infrastructure, while allowing the capability developer to concentrate on the math and physics, is reviewed in the context of the Vorpal application, which has found use across accelerator physics and many other fields.

Symplectic Modeling of Beam Loading in Electromagnetic Cavities

Simulating beam loading in radiofrequency accelerating structures is critical for understanding higher-order mode effects on beam dynamics, such as beam break-up instability in energy recovery linacs. Full wave simulations of beam loading in radiofrequency structures are computationally expensive, while reduced models can ignore essential physics and can be difficult to generalize. We present a self-consistent algorithm derived from the least-action principle which can model an arbitrary number of cavity eigenmodes and with a generic beam distribution.