A novel approach to synchrotron radiation simulation

At the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, synchrotron radiation (SR) is used to continuously monitor the transverse properties of the beams. Unfortunately the machine and beam parameters are such that the useful radiation emitted inside a separation dipole, chosen as source, is diffraction limited heavily affecting the accuracy of the measurement. In order to deconvolve the diffraction effects from the acquired beam images and in order to design an alternative monitor based on a double slit interferometer an extensive study of the synchrotron light source and of the optical propagation has been made. This study is based on simulations combining together several existing tools: SRW for the source, ZEMAX for the transport and MATLAB for the “glue” and analysis of the results. The resulting tool is very powerful and can be easily adapted to other synchrotron radiation problems. In this paper the simulation package and the way it is used will be described as well as the results obtained for the LHC and SPS.