TrapCAD — a program to model magnetic traps of charged particles Original Research Article

A graphical end-user program is presented that can be used to design and study magnetic traps with cylindrical and/or multipole symmetry. Originally it was developed for ECRIS (Electron Cyclotron Resonance Ion Source) designing. However, its usage is not restricted to studying ECRIS fields. It can be used in any case where solenoidal multipole fields have to be calculated, e.g. with other types of ion sources, or beam transport elements at particle accelerators. TrapCAD uses the output of the POISSON/PANDIRA group of codes as an input to reconstruct the 3D magnetic field. It visualizes the field line structure, computes the main parameters of the trap and simulates the motion of charged particles in the trap. The modelling of the microwave heating and ion-ion scattering are also possible.