Progress toward source-to-target simulation

Source-to-target simulation of an accelerator provides a thorough check on the consistency of the design as well as a detailed understanding of the beam behavior. Issues such as envelope mismatch and emittance growth can be examined in a self-consistent manner, including the details of accelerator transitions, long-term transport, and longitudinal compression. The large range in scales, from centimeter-scale transverse beam size and applied field scale-length, to meter-scale beam length, to kilometer-scale accelerator length, poses a significant computational challenge. The ever-increasing computational power that is becoming available through massively parallel computers is making such simulation realizable. This paper discusses the progress toward source-to-target simulation using the WARP particle-in-cell code. Representative examples are shown, including 3-D, long-term transport simulations of Integrated Research Experiment (IRE) scale accelerators.