Ionator
Welcome to the IONATOR home page!
Intro
IONATOR is a custom element for the simulation of electron impact ionization in General Particle Tracer (GPT). It uses Monte Carlo algorithms to calculate ionization probabilities and secondary electron energies, then calculates the trajectories of the ion, secondary electron, and scattered electron using relativistic kinematics. Currently supported gas species are H2, He, CO, CO2, and CH4, though other gas species may be added in the future. IONATOR has been benchmarked against theoretical equations and against simulations made using IBSimu, an established ion tracking code.
IONATOR was originally developed as part of my PhD thesis research, where I studied the efficacy of biasing the anode of the CEBAF photo-gun to mitigate ion damage and improve the operational lifetime. While the custom element was made to study electron impact ionization within electron accelerators, it is readily applicable to other applications involving ionization.
Along with IONATOR are two custom elements for analysis: writeIonInfo and colorcoding. writeIonInfo, as its name suggests, writes ionization parameters to a separate GDF file for analysis. colorcoding, as its name suggests, allows the user to color code each particle by particle set. While these two custom elements were developed for use with IONATOR, they can be used independently of IONATOR.