• B. Mustapha, P.N. Ostroumov, J. Xu
  ANL, Argonne
• J.-P. Carneiro
  Fermilab, Batavia

Funding: This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Nuclear Physics, under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357.

The latest version of PTRACK*, the parallel version of the beam dynamics code TRACK, is capable of simulating a very large number of particles (a billion or more). In the case of the Fermilab 8-GeV H-minus linac, it is possible to simulate the actual number of particles in the bunch. Taking advantage of this capability we are revisiting our original beam loss studies**, but this time with larger statistics and including a new process of beam loss which is the stripping of H^- ions. TRACK has recently been updated*** with the possibility of stripping H^- by three different processes, namely black body radiation, Lorentz force stripping and residual gas interactions. Results of ideal end-to-end simulations (no errors) with the actual number of particles in a beam bunch (860M) as well as error simulations for different sets of errors with 10M and eventually 100M particles per seed will be presented and discussed. These simulations are being performed on Argonne's new petascale computing facility "BG/P".

* J. Xu et al, Proceedings of HB-2008.
** P. Ostroumov, B. Mustapha and V.A. Aseev, Proceedings of Linac-06.
*** J.-P. Carneiro, B. Mustapha and P. Ostroumov, submitted to PRST-AB.

• J. Xu, B. Mustapha, J.A. Nolen, P.N. Ostroumov
  ANL, Argonne

Funding: This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Nuclear Physics, under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357.

Kinetic space plasma simulations are dominated by PIC (Particle-In-Cell) codes. Due to the inherent noise in PIC simulations, interest in directly solving the Vlasov equation is increasing. With the fast development of supercomputers, this is becoming more realistic. We present our preliminary work on solving the Vlasov equation for beam dynamics simulations*. A high order Spectral Element Method has been applied to achieve high accuracy, easy interpolation, and parallelization. Due to the inherent instability of the Vlasov equation, a spectral filter has been added and mass conservation has been satisfied. The proposed algorithms were validated on 1D1V simulations. A paraxial model of the Vlasov equation (2D2V) has also been studied and compared with PIC simulations at ANL using the BG/P supercomputer.

*J. Xu, P. Ostroumov and J. Nolen, “Highly Scalable Parallel Algorithm for 2D2V Vlasov Equation with High Order Spectral Element Method”, poster on SC08, Austin, Texas, Nov.15-20, 2008.

• E.R. Arab
  PBPL, Los Angeles
• G. Travish, N. Vartanian, J. Xu
  UCLA, Los Angeles, California
• R.B. Yoder
  Manhattanville College, Purchase, NY

The millimeter-scaleμAccelerator Platform (MAP)–essentially a “particle accelerator on a chip”–will ultimately allow for revolutionary medical and industrial applications due to its manageable size and reproducibility. The MAP consists of an electron source and an all-dielectric, laser powered, particle accelerator. The dielectric structure has two slab-symmetric reflecting mirrors with a vacuum gap between them. A periodic coupling mechanism allows laser power to enter transversely through one mirror. This mechanism is analogous to the slots of an optical diffraction grating, with coupling period and vacuum gap equal to the wavelength of the laser (800nm in this study). Work to date has included designing, fabricating and testing a prototype relativistic structure using a patterned gold layer. To go further, we have studied the fabrication techniques and electromagnetic designs of an all-dielectric (non-metallic) structure. Fabrication of the final structure is modeled after Vertical-Cavity Surface-Emitting Lasers (VCSEL) and Distributed Bragg Reflector (DBR) techniques. Preliminary numerical studies of the sub-relativistic structure are also presented.