The Particle Beam Optics Interactive Computer Laboratory

The Particle Beam Optics Interactive Computer Laboratory (PBO Lab) is an educational software concept to aid students and professionals in learning about charged particle beams and particle beam optical systems. The PBO Lab is being developed as a cross-platform application and includes four key elements. The first is a graphic user interface shell that provides for a highly interactive learning session. The second is a knowledge database containing information on electric and magnetic optics transport elements. The knowledge database provides interactive tutorials on the fundamental physics of charged particle optics and on the technology used in particle optics hardware. The third element is a graphical construction kit that provides tools for students to interactively and visually construct optical beamlines. The final element is a set of charged particle optics computational engines that compute trajectories, transport beam envelopes, fit parameters to optical constraints and carry out similar calculations for the student designed beamlines. The primary computational engine is provided by the third-order TRANSPORT code. Augmenting TRANSPORT is the multiple ray tracing program TURTLE and a first-order matrix program that includes a space charge model and support for calculating single particle trajectories in the presence of the beam space charge. This paper describes progress on the development of the PBO Lab