IMPACT-T User Document Version 1.6

Abstract

IMPACT-T is a fully three-dimensional program to track relativistic particles taking into account space charge forces and short-range longitudinal and transverse wakenelds. IMPACT-T is one of the few codes used in the photoinjector community that has a parallel implementation, making it very useful for high statistics simulations of beam halos and beam diagnostics. It has a comprehensive set of beamline elements, and furthermore allows arbitrary overlap of their fields, which gives the IMPACT-T a capability to model both the standing wave structure and traveling wave structure. It is also unique in its use of space-charge solvers based on an integrated Green function to efficiently and accurately treat beams with large aspect ratio, and a shifted Green function to efficiently treat image charge effects of a cathode. It is also unique in its inclusion of energy binning in the space-charge calculation to model beams with large energy spread. IMPACT-T has a flexible data structure that allows particles to be stored in containers with common characteristics; for photoinjector simulations the containers represent multiple slices, but in other applications they could correspond, e.g., to particles of different species. Together, all these features make IMPACT-T a powerful and versatile tool for modeling beams in photoinjectors and other systems.