Particle Simulations of DARHT-II Transport System

The DARHT-II beam line utilizes a fast stripline kicker to temporally chop a high current electron beam from a single induction LINAC and deliver multiple temporal electron beam pulses to an x-ray converter target. High beam quality needs to be maintained throughout the transport line from the end of the accelerator through the final focus lens to the x-ray converter target to produce a high quality radiographic image. Issues that will affect beam quality such as spot size and emittance at the converter target include dynamic effects associated with the stripline kicker as well as emittance growth due to the nonlinear forces associated with the kicker and various focusing elements in the transport line. In addition, dynamic effects associated with transverse resistive wall instability as well as gas focusing will affect the beam transport. A particle-in-cell code is utilized to evaluate beam transport in the downstream transport line in DARHT-II. External focusing forces are included utilizing either analytic expressions or field maps. Models for wakefields from the beam kicker, transverse resistive wall instability, and gas focusing are included in the simulation to provide a more complete picture of beam transport in DARHT-II. From these simulations, for various initial beam loadsmore » based on expected accelerator performance the temporally integrated target spot size and emittance can be estimated.« less