Crystal implementation in SixTrack for proton beams

Abstract

Crystal channeling is a property of crystals resulting from the extreme order in which the atoms are arranged: the crystalline lattice. Positive charged particles can get trapped between crystalline planes, and bending highly pure crystals allows deflecting high energy beams. Thus, they are very interesting for applications as primary collimator. The crystals installed in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) provide a deflection that is equivalent to a magnetic field of about 300 T ideally acting only on halo particles. The implementation of a crystal routine in the framework of the collimation tools used at CERN for simulations of expected beam loss pattern around the entire machine (SixTrack) is therefore mandatory. The crystal routine presented here is suited for high statistics tracking simulations in large hadron accelerators. An introduction to the crystal physics relevant for our purposes is reported, on which the models implemented in the routine are based. Then, the implementation of these models in SixTrack is described.