Analysis of Beam Instabilities for the Upgrade of the Diamond Storage Ring

Diamond Light Source is planning an upgrade of the existing storage ring to provide more and better light to experiments. To keep the electrons circulating inside the ring they have to travel inside a vacuum chamber, but then the electrons induce electromagnetic fields inside the chamber that act back on the electrons themselves. Depending on the machine settings this can cause the beam to become unstable, which reduces the performance of the machine or can even cause the beam to be completely lost. It is therefore necessary during the design process to simulate different machine settings and analyse the conditions for when the beam becomes unstable to be able to avoid instabilities in the real machine.

The simulations are done using tracking codes, where a group of electrons are simulated travelling around the ring while interacting with the electromagnetic fields. Due to the number of electrons needed in the simulation and the number of cases to simulate, this is commonly done using computer clusters. The purpose of this project is to contribute to the analysis of beam instabilities for the upgrade of the Diamond storage ring and improve the methods and tools used to make the analysis faster.