A free interactive matching program

For physicists and engineers involved in the design and analysis of beamlines (transfer lines or insertions) the lattice function matching problem is central and can be time-consuming because it involves constrained nonlinear optimization. For such problems convergence can be difficult to obtain in general without expert human intervention. Over the years, powerful codes have been developed to assist beamline designers. The canonical example is MAD (Methodical Accelerator Design) developed at CERN by Christophe Iselin. MAD, through a specialized command language, allows one to solve a wide variety of problems, including matching problems. Although in principle, the MAD command interpreter can be run interactively, in practice the solution of a matching problem involves a sequence of independent trial runs. Unfortunately, but perhaps not surprisingly, there still exists relatively few tools exploiting the resources offered by modern environments to assist lattice designer with this routine and repetitive task. In this paper, we describe a fully interactive lattice matching program, written in C++ and assembled using freely available software components. An important feature of the code is that the evolution of the lattice functions during the nonlinear iterative process can be graphically monitored in real time; the user can dynamically interrupt the iterations at will to introduce new variables, freeze existing ones into their current state and/or modify constraints. The program runs under both UNIX and Windows NT

CHEF: a status report

CHEF refers both to a framework and to an interactive application emphasizing accelerator optics calculations. The framework supports multiple domains of applications: e.g. nonlinear analysis, perturbation theory, and tracking. Its underlying philosophy is to provide an infrastructure with minimum hidden implicit assumptions, general enough to facilitate both routine and specialized computational tasks, and to minimize the duplication of necessary, complex bookkeeping tasks. CHEF was already described in recent conferences. This paper is a status report on recent developments, including issues related to applications to high energy linacs