Beam loss studies in high-intensity heavy-ion linacs

A low beam-loss budget is an essential requirement for high-intensity machines and represents one of their major design challenges. In a high-intensity heavy-ion machine, losses are required to be below 1 W/m for hands-on-maintenance. The driver linac of the Rare Isotope Accelerator (RIA) is designed to accelerate beams of any ion to energies from 400 MeV per nucleon for uranium up to 950 MeV for protons with a beam power of up to 400 kW. The high intensity of the heaviest ions is achieved by acceleration of multiple-charge-state beams, which requires a careful beam dynamics optimization to minimize effective emittance growth and beam halo formation. For beam loss simulation purposes, large number of particles must be tracked through the linac. Therefore the computer code TRACK has been parallelized and calculations are being performed on the JAZZ cluster recently inaugurated at ANL. This paper discusses how this powerful tool is being used for simulations for the RIA project to help decide on the high-performance and cost-effective design of the driver linac