Overview

This course will provide to the student an introductory overview of fundamental physics and computational techniques basic to the study of particle beam acceleration and transport. While many highly specialized codes and advanced techniques exist to produce precision results of the many detailed problems in particle accelerator design and application, this course sets out to introduce the student to programming procedures and methods for the calculation of many situations found in the dynamics of charged particle beams. Such problems may involve simple coding, specialized plotting and fitting, the use of simple solvers and minimization routines, Monte Carlo-style modeling with ensuing data analyses, essential matrix methods, and more, but will also include introductions to field/potential solvers and optics design codes used in the practice of magnet, cavity, and beam transport system design.

The student in this course will be guided in studies of particle beam transport, beam optical systems, particle acceleration, particle interactions with matter, and particle spin dynamics with emphasis on sensitivity analyses and elements of system design for various beam transport systems and electromagnetic elements routinely found in high energy and nuclear physics facilities.

By the end of the course the student should be able to demonstrate sufficient knowledge and skills to perform basic analyses of lowest-order beam optical systems in terms of stable beam transport, control of beam quality (emittance, energy spread, polarization, etc.), as well as basic estimations of hardware requirements.

In addition to the physics, the student will be introduced to basic tools and techniques for producing reproducible research, such as the use of the R/python programming languages, markdown documents, and LaTeX typsetting to generate scientific notebooks and make quality reports.

Topics

Topics to be covered in this course include (order may vary):

• intro/review of fundamental beam physics
  
• reproducible research techniques (R/python, markdown, notebooks, LaTeX)
  
• essential modeling and data analysis techniques (using R/python)
  
• particle beams and phase space analyses
  
• basic field calculations in magnets and cavities (using FEMM)
  
• basic beam optics calculations (using MAD-X)
  
• beam interactions with materials (using g4beamline)
  
• application to special topics, such as:
  • sensitivity analyses
    
  • nonlinear particle motion
    
  • diffusive effects
    
  • space charge and beam-beam interactions
    
  • synchrotron radiation

The above list and the course timeline will evolve as the course progresses.

Grading (tentative) and Timeline

Student evaluation will be performed through a set of homework assignments and computational projects. The final evaluation will also include the student’s development of an electronic notebook of the course’s activities, codes, and results.

Time line: August 26, 2019 – December 14, 2019