Progress toward source-to-target simulation

Source-to-target simulation of an accelerator provides a thorough check on the consistency of the design as well as a detailed understanding of the be am behavior. Issues such as envelope mismatch and emittance growth can be e xamined in a self-consistent manner, including the details of accelerator t ransitions, long-term transport, and longitudinal compression. The large ra nge in scales, from centimeter-scale transverse beam size and applied field scale-length, to meter-scale beam length, to kilometer-scale accelerator l ength, poses a significant computational challenge. The ever-increasing com putational power that is becoming available through massively parallel comp uters is making such simulation realizable. This paper discusses the progre ss toward source-to-target simulation using the WARP particle-in-cell code. Representative examples are shown, including 3-D, long-term transport simu lations of Integrated Research Experiment (IRE) scale accelerators, (C) 200 1 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.