U.S. Particle Accelerator School
Modern Computational Accelerator Physics course
Sponsoring University:
Texas A&M University
Course:
Modern Computational Accelerator Physics
Instructors:
Panagiotis Spentzouris and James Amundson, Fermilab
Overview
The design and optimization of modern particle accelerators depends heavily on the utilization of computer simulations. This course will provide an introduction to numerical and computational methods for accelerator physics as well as the context in which different methods are applicable. Emphasis will be placed on modeling beam dynamics; the example applications will be relevant to ILC components. The primary audience will be students and physicists who are using, or planning to use, accelerator modeling tools for accelerator design or optimization applications.
Prerequisites
The students will be assumed to have a basic knowledge of accelerator physics and some programming experience.
Objectives
Upon completion of this course, the student is expected to be able to effectively utilize computational beam dynamics simulation techniques and have a basic understanding of the requirements for developing such tools.
Instructional Method
The course will span one week. For the first four days, each morning and afternoon the students will receive one hour of lecture, followed by one hour of lab in the morning and two hours in the afternoon. The last day will be entirely labs and discussions. The computational aspect of the course will utilize high-level languages, state-of-the-art numerical libraries, and production beam dynamics codes. The students will be assigned daily homework and a take-home final exam.
Course Content
Topics will include a review of the Hamiltonian formalism, numerical integration, single-particle optics, collective effects, and parallel computations. The laboratory exercises will begin with simple single-particle calculations involving idealized optical systems and progress to multi-particle simulations of collective effects. By the end of the week, the students will have gained familiarity with the algorithms commonly used in PIC codes. Throughout the course we will discuss the physics implementation and the numerical algorithms used in the laboratory problems.
Reading Requirements
Course notes, relevant papers, and reference material will be distributed by the instructors before the beginning of the course.