RF-Track: Beam tracking in field maps including space-charge effects, features and benchmarks

RF-Track is a novel tracking code developed at CERN for the optimization of low-energy ion linacs in presence of space-charge effects. RF-Track features great flexibility and rapid simulation speed. It can transport beams of particles with arbitrary mass and charge even mixed together, solving fully relativistic equations of motion. It implements direct space-charge effects in a physically consistent manner, using parallel algorithms. It can simulate bunched beams as well as continuous ones, and transport through conventional elements as well as through maps of oscillating radio-frequency fields. RF-Track is written in optimized and parallel C++, and it uses the scripting languages Octave and Python as user interfaces. RF-Track has been tested successfully in several cases. The main features of the code and the results of its benchmark studies are presented in this paper.