Improved envelope and centroid equations for high current beams

The standard envelope equation for charged particle beams (e.g., Lee-Cooper) neglects self-field contributions from the beam rotation and the slope of the beam envelope. We have carried out an expansion that includes these effects to first order, resulting in a new equation for the edge radius. The change in beam kinetic energy due to space-charge depression as the beam radius varies is also included. For the centroid equation, we have included the “self-steering” effect due to the curvature of the beam orbit. To leading order, there is a cancellation between the self-steering effect and the space-charge depression of the beam energy, so that a more accurate centroid equation is obtained by using the undepressed value of the energy (i.e., the total beam energy) to calculate the orbit. We have implemented the envelope and centroid equations in the LAMDA code [1]. The effect of the new terms will be illustrated with calculations for the DARHT accelerators at the Los Alamos National Laboratory [2].