ACE3P – Multi-Physics Modeling, Code Integration, and Enabling Technologies

ACE3P is a comprehensive set of parallel finite-element codes for multi-physics modeling of particle accelerators which run on massively parallel computer platforms for high-fidelity and high-accuracy simulations. The ACE3P code suite enables rapid virtual prototyping of accelerator rf components for optimal design and analysis. Recent advances of ACE3P have been achieved through the implementation of advanced numerical algorithms, enhancement of multi-physics modeling capabilities, integration with beam dynamics and particle-matter interaction codes toward start-to-end simulation, and improvement of code performance on state-of-the-art high-performance computing (HPC) platforms for large-scale computations. In previous work, ACE3P has been applied to the design and optimization of many accelerator projects for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). In this paper, we focus on applications in high-brightness injectors and high-gradient accelerators. In one example, a normal-conducting (NC) LCLSII rf gun has been fully evaluated with ACE3P by performing cavity shape design, simulating multipacting (MP) effects, and analyzing thermal and mechanical features. In another example, ACE3P has been used to design and optimize the novel high gradient distributed accelerator cavity for the proposed Higgs factory C3 using cool copper C-band technology. In a recent collaboration, an integrated ACE3P and beam dynamics code IMPACT workflow, A3PI, provided realistic studies of the beam performance for the LCLS-II high energy (LCLS-II-HE) upgrade Low Emittance Injector (LEI) accelerator system by performing start-to-end simulations including cavity imperfections. The ACE3P development team has collaborated with Kitware and Simmetrix through a SBIR program to make ACE3P more accessible to a broader accelerator community through the development of enabling technologies such as a graphical user interface (GUI), a simulation workflow for HPC platforms, and an advanced meshing technique for automatic shape optimization. All the simulations presented in this paper were performed on the supercomputers at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Center.