No abstract

The beams in a heavy-ion-beam-driven inertial fusion (HIF) accelerator are collisionless, nonneutral plasmas, confined by applied magnetic and electric fields. These space-charge-dominated beams must be focused onto small (few mm) spots at the fusion target, and so preservation of a small emittance is crucial. The nonlinear beam self-fields can lead to emittance growth, and so a self-consistent field description is needed. To this end, a multidimensional particle simulation code, warp [Friedman et al., Part. Accel. 37-38, 131 (1992)], has been developed and is being used to study the transport of HIF beams. The code’s three-dimensional (3-D) package combines features of an accelerator code and a particle-in-cell plasma simulation. Novel techniques allow it to follow beams through many accelerator elements over long distances and around bends. This paper first outlines the algorithms employed in warp. A number of applications and corresponding results are then presented. These applications include studies of: beam drift-compression in a misaligned lattice of quadrupole focusing magnets; beam equilibria, and the approach to equilibrium; and the MBE-4 experiment [AIP Conference Proceedings 152 (AIP, New York, 1986), p. 145] recently concluded at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL). Finally, 3-D simulations of bent-beam dynamics relevant to the planned Induction Linac Systems Experiments (ILSE) [Fessenden, Nucl. Instrum. Methods Plasma Res. A 278, 13 (1989)] at LBL are described. Axially cold beams are observed to exhibit little or no root-mean-square emittance growth at midpulse in transiting a (sharp) bend. Axially hot beams, in contrast, do exhibit some emittance growth.

The pseudo-spectral analytical time-domain (PSATD) particle-in-cell (PIC) algorithm solves the vacuum Maxwell's equations exactly, has no Courant timestep limit (as conventionally defined), and offers substantial flexibility in plasma and particle beam simulations. It is, however, not free of the usual numerical instabilities, including the numerical Cherenkov instability, when applied to relativistic beam simulations. This paper derives and solves the numerical dispersion relation for the PSATD algorithm and compares the results with corresponding behavior of the more conventional pseudo-spectral time-domain (PSTD) and finite difference time-domain (FDTD) algorithms. In general, PSATD offers superior stability properties over a reasonable range of time steps. More importantly, one version of the PSATD algorithm, when combined with digital filtering, is almost completely free of the numerical Cherenkov instability for time steps (scaled to the speed of light) comparable to or smaller than the axial cell size.

Plasma simulations are often rendered challenging by the disparity of scales in time and in space which must be resolved. When these disparities are in distinctive zones of the simulation domain, a method which has proven to be effective in other areas (e.g. fluid dynamics simulations) is the mesh refinement technique. We briefly discuss the challenges posed by coupling this technique with

For many issues relevant to acceleration and propagation of heavy-ion beams for inertial confinement fusion, understanding the behavior of the beam requires the self-consistent inclusion of the self-fields of the beams in multiple dimensions. For these reasons, the three-dimensional simulation code WAR93d A.Friedman[l] was developed. The code combines the particle-in-cell plasma simulation technique with a realistic description of the elements which make up an accelerator. In this paper, the general structure of the code is reviewed and details of two ongoing applications are presented along with a discussion of simulation techniques used. The most important results of this work are presented.