Longitudinal phase space tomography with space charge

Abstract

Tomography is now a very broad topic with a wealth of algorithms for the reconstruction of both qualitative and quantitative images. In an extension in the domain of particle accelerators, one of the simplest algorithms has been modified to take into account the nonlinearity of large-amplitude synchrotron motion. This permits the accurate reconstruction of longitudinal phase space density from one-dimensional bunch profile data. The method is a hybrid one which incorporates particle tracking. Hitherto, a very simple tracking algorithm has been employed because only a brief span of measured profile data is required to build a snapshot of phase space. This is one of the strengths of the method, as tracking for relatively few turns relaxes the precision to which input machine parameters need to be known. The recent addition of longitudinal space charge considerations as an optional refinement of the code is described. Simplicity suggested an approach based on the derivative of bunch shape with the properties of the vacuum chamber parametrized by a single value of distributed reactive impedance and by a geometrical coupling coefficient. This is sufficient to model the dominant collective effects in machines of low to moderate energy. In contrast to simulation codes, binning is not an issue since the profiles to be differentiated are measured ones. The program is written in Fortran 90 with high-performance Fortran extensions for parallel processing. A major effort has been made to identify and remove execution bottlenecks, for example, by reducing floating-point calculations and recoding slow intrinsic functions. A pointerlike mechanism which avoids the problems associated with pointers and parallel processing has been implemented. This is required to handle the large, sparse matrices that the algorithm employs. Results obtained with and without the inclusion of space charge are presented and compared for proton beams in the CERN protron synchrotron booster. Comparisons of execution times on different platforms are presented and the chosen solution for our application program, which uses a dual processor PC for the number crunching, is described.