Exploratory orbit analysis

An attempt is made to describe an exploratory orbit analysis (EOA) environment. This would be an environment in which accelerator physicists who want to explore the behavior of particle orbits can quickly and easily use a variety of tools from perturbation theory, Lyapunov stability analysis, etc. without becoming experts on them. It is suggested that an EOA environment can be designed in analogy to EDA (exploring data analysis) environments so that physicists can explore dynamics, form hypotheses, and test them. Particular attention is given to AESOP (Analysis and Exploration of Simulated Orbits in Phase space), an attempt to create a prototype EOA graphics interface. EOA is also considered with respect to slicing and dicing, separatrix searchers and chaos measurement.<>