Calculation of longitudinal fields of high-current beams within conducting chambers

A technique for computing the longitudinal electric fields of a bunched beam propagating inside a conducting pipe is presented. A beam bunch is represented as a series of discs or slices, and the total electrical field is found by superposition of the fields of individual slices. The results of this technique agree well with other independent algorithms. The primary motivation for developing this technique is to provide efficient space charge calculations for beam dynamics simulation. However, the formalism may be employed in other applications to find electric fields for various beam density distributions in the presence of conducting boundaries.