Aberrations in the thermal wave model: comparison with particle tracking simulations

The propagation of a charged particle beam throughout a generic nonlinear optical device including quadrupole, sextupole and octupole terms is approached here by means of the thermal wave model for transverse particle-beam dynamics, and in the thin lens approximation. In this framework, the model predictions are compared with the results of a conventional single particle tracking code, where the collective behaviour is taken into account statistically. The results of this analysis show a remarkable agreement between the predictions of the wave model and the output of the particle tracking simulations. This opens the possibility of studying transverse beam dynamics with a novel and promising approach.