M.Phil. Alistair Muir

Raum Ex 135

Tel.: +49 (0) 381 498-7034
Fax: +49 (0) 381 498-7081

E-Mail: alistair.muir(at)uni-rostock.de 

Research Interests
  • Wakefield and beam impedance characterisation in particle accelerators

  • Performance of undulators in particle accelerators

  • State-space modelling of electromagnetic fields

Research Projects Description

BMBF Joint Project 05K2022 - WAKE

Undulators are key components in synchrotron light sources. The purpose of an undulator is to manipulate a beam of charged particles to produce a coherent, high-luminosity photon beam (typically soft or hard X-rays). The beam is composed of bunches of particles, and each bunch has an associated electromagnetic field. This field is affected by the environment - each bunch loses energy in the form of wakefields, which in turn affects the overall beam impedance. Furthermore, much of the lost energy ends up as thermal energy in the environment, potentially leading to heat spots in the undulator. Therefore, an accurate method to model the wakefields and beam impedance inside an undulator would be a very useful tool in understanding and optimising the performance of an undulator. Past efforts to perform an accurate and reliable impedance analysis of undulators have had limited success and require costly computational resources. This is due to both the complex geometry of modern undulators and the suboptimal numerical methods employed by current commercial software. The first goal of this project is to produce software capable of performing accurate impedance analysis of complex structures with modest computing resources by adopting advanced numerical methods (including state-space concatenation, model order reduction and the coupled S-parameter calcuation). Further goals include developing the software to be able to perform impedance and heat-load analyses of a complete undulator model, verify its results against experimental data from undulators at BESSY II and aid in the development of future undulators.

Supervisor:
Prof. Dr. rer. nat. habil. Ursula van Rienen