Start-to-end Simulation of Free-electron Lasers

Start-to-end (S2E) modeling of free-electron lasers (FELs) normally requires the use of multiple codes to correctly capture the physics in each region of the machine. Codes such as PARMELA, IMPACT-T or MICHELLE, for instance, may be used to simulate the injector. From there the linac and transport line may be handled by codes such as DIMAD, ELEGANT or IMPACT-Z. Finally, at the FEL a wiggler interaction code such as GENESIS, GINGER, or MINERVA must be used. These codes may be optimized to work with a wide range in magnitude of macro-particle numbers (from 10⁴-10⁸ in different codes) and have different input formats. It is therefore necessary to have translator codes to provide a bridge between each section. It is essential that these translators be able to preserve the statistical properties of the bunch while raising or lowering the number of macro-particles used between codes. In this work we show a suite of such translators designed to facilitate S2E simulations of an FEL with a new wiggler code, MINERVA, and use these codes to provide benchmarking of MINERVA against other common wiggler simulation codes.