
Sympletic tracking methods for insertion devices:
a Robinson wiggler example
Ji Li,∗J¨org Feikes, Tom Mertens, Edward Rial, Markus Ries, Andreas Sch¨alicke, and Luis Vera Ramirez
Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin f¨ur Materialien und Energie GmbH (HZB),
Albert-Einstein-Straße 15, 12489 Berlin, Germany
(Dated: October 12, 2022)
Modern synchrotron light sources are often characterized with high-brightness synchrotron radia-
tion from insertion devices. Inevitably, insertion devices introduce nonlinear distortion to the beam
motion. Symplectic tracking is crucial to study the impact, especially for the low- and medium-
energy storage rings. This paper uses a Robinson wiggler as an example to illustrate an universally
applicable analytical representation of the magnetic field and to summarizes four different symplectic
tracking methods.
I. INTRODUCTION
With the aim of high-brightness synchrotron radiation,
the storage rings of modern synchrotron light sources
mostly adopt strong-focusing lattices, which result in
large negative natural chromaticities and need strong sex-
tupoles to correct the chromaticity to suppress the head-
tail instability. Therefore nonlinear distortion is intro-
duced to beam motion by strong sextupole fields. Fur-
thermore, insertion devices, fringe fields and imperfec-
tions of magnets are additional sources of nonlinearity.
The nonlinear distortion from the magnets determines
long-term beam stability and has strong impact on oper-
ational performance.
The analysis of long-term beam dynamics in the stor-
age ring is established by symplectic particle tracking.
In general, symplectic tracking can be divided into two
steps. First, an accurate analytical expression of mag-
netic field is needed. Second, the symplectic integra-
tion to solve the Hamiltonian equations of the parti-
cle’s motion inside the magnetic field is conducted step-
wise element by element for multiple turns. Unlike the
Runge-Kutta integration which is usually not sympletic
and may introduce artificial damping and antidamping
effect, sympletic integration leads to the canonical trans-
formation of phase space vector and satisfies Liouville’s
theorem.
In tracking codes the effect of dipoles and multipoles
are usually modeled with an impulse boundary approxi-
mation, also called hard-edge model, in which the mag-
netic field is assumed to be constant within the effective
boundary of the magnet and zero outside. In this model,
only the longitudinal component of the vector potential is
needed to describe the system. Since the coordinates and
their conjugate canonical momenta are not mixed in the
Hamiltonian, the Hamiltonian can be split into drift-kick
combinations [1].
The proposed Robinson Wiggler (RW) for the Metrol-
ogy Light Source (MLS) [2], designed and studied in
∗ji.li@helmholtz-berlin.de
Ref. [3], is used to illustrate symplectic tracking meth-
ods for insertion devices. It consists of a chain of 12
combined-function magnets, shown in Fig. 1, with the
aim to lengthen the bunch by transferring the longitudi-
nal damping to transverse plane. As shown in Fig. 2, the
magnetic field in the RW is three-dimensional (3D), hor-
izontally asymmetric and much more complicated than
the impulse boundary model, thus the splitting methods
for dipoles and multipoles are not applicable any more.
FIG. 1. The model of the RW in RADIA [4].
FIG. 2. The vertical magnetic field on the midplane of the
RW.
In this paper, the principle of the RW and the necessity
of symplectic tracking is briefly introduced in section II.
Then in section III the basic concepts for symplectic in-
tegration are revisited. In section IV an analytical repre-
sentation is proposed to describe the 3D field in the RW
accurately. On this basis, three sympletic integration
methods are introduced to solve the Hamiltonian equa-
tions of motion for electrons in section V. In section VI, a
monomial map approach independent of analytic expres-
sion of the magnetic field is introduced to realize faster
tracking. The methods in this paper are universally ap-
plicable to all wigglers and undulators with a straight
reference trajectory.
arXiv:2210.05345v1 [physics.acc-ph] 11 Oct 2022