The Particle Beam Optics Interactive Computer Laboratory for personal computers and workstations

The Particle Beam Optics Interactive Computer Laboratory (PBO Lab) is a new software concept to aid both students and professionals in modeling charged particle beams and particle beam optical systems. The PBO Lab has been designed to run on several computer platforms and includes four key elements: (1) a graphic user interface shell, (2) a graphic beamline construction kit for users to interactively and visually construct optical beam lines, (3) a knowledge database on electric and magnetic optics elements, including interactive tutorials on the physics of charged particle optics and on the technology used in particle optics hardware, and (4) a set of charged particle optics computational engines that computes transport matrices, beam envelopes and trajectories, fits parameters to optical constraints, and carries out similar calculations for the graphically-defined beam lines.