A new semianalytical method of investigating the beam dynamics for electron injectors was developed. In this method, a short bunched electron beam is assumed to be an ensemble of several segmentation pieces in both the longitudinal and the transverse directions. The trajectory of each electron in the segmentation pieces is solved by the beam envelope equations while taking into account the space charge fields produced by all the pieces, the electromagnetic fields of an rf cavity, and the image charge fields at a cathode surface. The shape of the entire bunch is consequently calculated, and thus the emittances can be obtained from weighted mean values of the solutions for the obtained electron trajectories. The advantage of this method is its unique assumption for the beam parameters. We assume that each segmentation slice is not warped in the calculations. Although if the beam energy is low and the charge density is large, this condition is not satisfied, in practice, this condition is usually satisfied. We have performed beam dynamics calculations to obtain traces in free space and in the BNL-type rf gun cavity by comparing the analytical solutions with those obtained by simulation. In most cases, the emittances obtained by the simulation become closer to those obtained analytically with increasing the number of particles used in the simulation. Therefore, the analytically obtained emittances are expected to coincide with converged values obtained by the simulation. The applicable range of the analytical method for the BNL-type rf gun cavity is under 0.5 nC per bunch. This range is often used in recently built x-ray free electron laser facilities.

• Received 4 April 2012

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevSTAB.15.064201

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Published by the American Physical Society