• S. Schnepp, E. Gjonaj, T. Weiland
  TEMF, Darmstadt

In many applications the self-consistent simulation of charged particle beams is necessary. Especially, in low-energetic sections such as injectors the interaction between particles and fields considering all effects has to be taken into account. Well-known programs like the MAFIA TS modules typically use the Particle-In-Cell (PIC) method for beam dynamics simulations. Since they use a fixed computational grid which has to resolve the bunch adequately, they suffer from enormous memory consumption. Therefore and especially in the 3D case, only rather short sections can be simulated. This may be avoided using adaptive mesh refinement techniques (AMR). Since their application in Finite-Difference methods in time-domain is critical concerning instabilities, usually problem-matched but static meshes are used. In this paper a code working on the basis of a fully dynamic Cartesian grid is presented allowing for simulations capturing both, a high spatial resolution in the vicinity of the bunch and the possibility of simulating structures up to a length of several meters. The code is tested and validated using the RF electron gun of the Photoinjector Test Facility at DESY Zeuthen (PITZ) as an example. The evolution of various beam parameters along the gun is compared with the results obtained by different beam dynamics programs.