ATS Seminar - The RF-Track tracking code - Features and example applications

by Andrea Latina (CERN)

Thursday 18 Sept 2025, 10:00 → 11:00 Europe/Zurich

513/1-024 (CERN)

Speaker

Andrea Latina (BE-ABP-CAP)

 

Abstract

RF-Track is a high-performance particle tracking code developed at CERN for the simulation and optimisation of particle accelerators.

 

It supports beams with arbitrary energy, mass, charge, and spin polarisation, and is particularly suited to high-intensity injectors and linacs, proton and ion RFQs, positron sources, photoinjectors, medical accelerators, inverse Compton scattering sources, and unconventional systems such as the cooling channel of a future muon collider.

 

It includes a growing set of collective effects: space-charge forces in bunched and continuous beams, synchrotron radiation emission, short- and long-range wakefields, beam loading (and its compensation), intra-beam scattering, and particle–matter interaction. RF-Track is implemented in optimised, parallel C++ and available with Python and Octave interfaces, enabling seamless integration with other codes and flexible development of complex simulations.

 

At CERN the code is actively used for the design and optimisation of the FCC-ee and CLIC injectors, their positron sources, the muon collider cooling channel, the CLEAR facility, and medical accelerator setups. RFQs and Linac4 simulations have also been performed. This seminar presents an overview of the code and showcases selected applications, concluding with a live demonstration.

 

Bio 

Andrea Latina received his PhD in experimental nuclear physics from the University of Turin, Italy, in 2005. That same year, he was awarded a CERN Fellowship to work on beam dynamics for the Compact Linear Collider (CLIC), where he began specialising in accelerator design. In 2008, he received the "John Peoples" Fellowship at Fermilab, where he spent almost three years contributing to the International Linear Collider (ILC) and the design of a new high-intensity proton linac, now part of PIP-II.

 

Since late 2010, he has been a staff member at CERN. He focused on future colliders such as CLIC, and ILC, and more recently on the FCC-ee injectors.

 

In recent years, his work has included the design and optimisation of compact light sources (CompactLight), medical accelerators for cancer therapy based on X-band technology, as well as compact X-ray sources.

 

Andrea has taught Transverse Beam Dynamics at the Joint University Accelerator School (JUAS) for over a decade and currently lectures on Computational Tools and Numerical Methods in Accelerator Physics at the CERN Accelerator School. He has contributed to the development of several accelerator physics codes and is the principal developer of RF-Track, which he will present today. 

 

ATS Seminar Organisers
A. Dallocchio (EN), E. Metral (BE), M. Modena (ATS-DO), T. Stora (SY), A. Sublet (TE)

 

2025_09_18_ATS_Seminar.pdf

ATSseminar_18-09-25_ShortSummary.pdf

Demos.zip