Decoherence of beam oscillations in the SSC due to beam-beam collisions

Computer simulations were made to study the decoherence of beam oscillations in the SSC collider due to the tune shift generated by the head-on beam-beam interaction. Our simulation results on the average tune shift and the RMS tune spread were compared with previous theoretical estimates and excellent agreement was found. Our simulations also confirmed the expectation that the decoherence time increases with decreasing tune spread in the beam. A simple procedure was presented to quantify the decoherence time from the simulated growth of the beam emittance relative to the beam centroid