High order time integrators for the simulation of charged particle motion in magnetic quadrupoles

Abstract Magnetic quadrupoles are essential components of particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider. In order to study numerically the stability of the particle beam crossing a quadrupole, a large number of particle revolutions in the accelerator must be simulated. This requires to preserve numerically invariants of motion over a long time interval and entails a substantial computational cost, mostly related to the repeated evaluation of the magnetic vector potential. In this paper, in order to reduce this cost, we first consider a specific gauge transformation that allows to reduce significantly the number of vector potential evaluations. We then analyse the sensitivity of the numerical solution to the interpolation procedure required to compute magnetic vector potential data from gridded precomputed values at the locations required by high order time integration methods. Finally, we compare several high order integration techniques, in order to assess their accuracy and efficiency for these long term simulations. Explicit high order Lie methods are considered, along with implicit high order symplectic integrators and conventional explicit Runge–Kutta methods. Among symplectic methods, high order Lie integrators yield optimal results in terms of cost/accuracy ratios, but non-symplectic Runge–Kutta methods perform remarkably well even in very long term simulations. Furthermore, the accuracy of the field reconstruction and interpolation techniques appears to be the limiting factors for the accuracy of the particle tracking procedures.