17–22 May 2026
C.I.D
Europe/Zurich timezone

Using Normalizing Flows in Normal-Form Space to Model Intra-Beam Stripping

WEP4348
20 May 2026, 16:00
2h
C.I.D

C.I.D

Deauville, France
Board: Wednesday baguette: BE13
Poster Presentation MC4.A08: Hadron accelerators: Linear Accelerators Poster session

Speaker

Austin Hoover (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

Description

Intra-beam stripping (IBSt) is a critical beam-loss mechanism in high-intensity H- linacs and presents a significant limitation to increasing beam power. This work presents a computational framework to evaluate IBSt-induced beam losses along the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) linac for arbitrary bunch distributions. The calculation is based on evaluating the IBSt loss integral using a probability density function (PDF) trained on discrete-particle bunch distributions with normalizing flows. The input distribution is transformed to scaled normal-form coordinates, which improves both normalizing-flow training and Monte Carlo (MC) sampling. The method is benchmarked against simplified analytically solvable Gaussian bunches and then applied to canonical-angular-momentum-dominated (CAM-dominated) beam distributions, which contains strong inter-plane correlations. The results show that the normal-form-coordinate approach improves MC sampling stability and enables efficient IBSt loss calculations for correlated beam distributions.

Paper status Resubmitted proceeding files received and assigned to an editor. Accepted.

Author

Shivam Kakkar (University of Tennessee at Knoxville)

Co-authors

Austin Hoover (Oak Ridge National Laboratory) Lawrence Lee (University of Tennessee at Knoxville) Nicholas Evans (Oak Ridge National Laboratory) Vasiliy Morozov (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

Presentation materials