Recent developments of the HEADTAIL code and benchmarking

by Giovanni Rumolo (CERN)

Thursday 17 Apr 2008, 11:00 → 12:00 Europe/Zurich

AB Auditorium Meyrin (CERN)

The HEADTAIL code was originally developed in 2000 with the goal of studying the interaction between a proton or positron bunch and an electron cloud with fixed density. The initial model was based on a soft Gaussian approximation for the beam slices and treated the electrons as macro-particles with finite size. By 2002 a fast Particle-In-Cell electron cloud-beam module had reliably replaced the initial algorithm and, in addition, the code had been already extended to describe the interaction of a single bunch with a localized source of impedance. Over the following years, the HEADTAIL code has been continuously improved and gradually transformed into a versatile tool for collective effects, able to deal with a broad variety of problems. Presently, several classes of single bunch transverse and longitudinal collective phenomena can be modeled with HEADTAIL, ranging from the electron cloud coherent and incoherent effects with a realistic modeling of the cloud distribution to various types of beam instabilities and space charge effects. Where possible, the code was successfully benchmarked against analytical solutions, other codes or experimental results. In the near future we plan to provide HEADTAIL with reliable wake fields valid in the low energy regime, a space charge module for the longitudinal plane, and an option to perform multi-bunch simulations with long-range wakes.

The aim of this talk is to give a general introduction to the physics model and the features implemented in HEADTAIL, and subsequently focus on a few applications of the code selected among recent studies of the beam collective behavior in the CERN PS and SPS.

Information: http://cern.ch/AB-seminar/