Fermilab Today Wednesday, March 10, 2010
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From the Accelerator Physics Center

Virtual accelerators

Panagiotis Spentzouris

Panagiotis Spentzouris, principal investigator of the ComPASS project and department head of the Accelerator and Detector Simulation Department in the Computing Division, wrote this week's column.

In the next 10 years, HEP scientists will conduct experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, design upgrades to the LHC accelerator complex and develop novel concepts and technologies for the next lepton collider. This will advance research at the Energy Frontier. At the Intensity Frontier, HEP scientists will carry out experiments with high-intensity proton sources for neutrino physics and rare process searches, design the next generation of high-intensity proton sources, known as Project X, and advance the design of a high-intensity muon source for a neutrino factory.

The Community Petascale Project for Accelerator Science and Simulation - a multi-institutional collaboration of computational accelerator physicists, led by Fermilab - works on these projects together with colleagues in Fermilab's Accelerator Physics Center and the Computing Division and at accelerator laboratories around the world. Over the next few years, the ComPASS team will focus on designing the various parts of the Project X accelerator complex, optimizing acceleration structures for the next lepton collider and helping develop new accelerator concepts such as muon- and plasma-based accelerators.

The design, cost effectiveness and successful operation of future accelerators require the optimization of many parameters and the understanding of many physics processes. For example, we need to understand how the particles in a high-intensity beam interact with each other and how they interact with their surroundings, various accelerator components and complex electromagnetic fields that change when particles travel through them.

The ComPASS team simulates these physics processes by employing computational accelerator models that require advanced algorithms and massive computing time. Today such computations achieve high accuracy and greatly shorten the time required to design and optimize accelerators. They reduce the number of trial-and-error cycles for producing accelerator component prototypes and help save money.

In the past seven years, Fermilab has laid the groundwork for these computations with the help of DOE's Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing program, which funds ComPASS. We've applied the ComPASS codes to existing and proposed accelerator facilities such as the Tevatron, PEP-II, LHC, RHIC, NLC, ILC, SNS and LCLS, and to support R&D in plasma- and laser wakefield-based acceleration. At Fermilab, our results have been used to optimize Tevatron performance, study losses and collimation in the Booster, design the Debuncher beam extraction for Mu2e and study collective beam effects in the Main Injector for Project X.

The ComPASS team will continue to enhance its simulation software to take advantage of emerging computing technologies and support the next generation accelerators at Fermilab.

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