Visual Inspection of a VORPAL Modeled Crab Cavity

Tech-X Wins Award for Visualization

Boulder, CO – July 17, 2008 Tech-X Corporation was one of the recipients of a SciDAC award for visualization at the annual meeting of the U.S. Department of Energy's Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program held in Seattle July 13–17. SciDAC held an Electronic Visualization and Poster night July 13 as part of its 2008 meeting. Fifty-two entries took part in the competition, and 10, including the Tech-X entry, won OASCR (for Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research) awards.

The animation, created by Tech-X researchers John R. Cary and Travis Austin, displays the oscillating electric and magnetic field lines, in addition to the magnetic field magnitude on the cavity surfaces, for the fundamental mode that oscillates at 3902.81 MHz inside a "crab cavity", which is used in the final beam delivery system for particle colliders. This mode and multiple other modes were extracted simultaneously from time sequences generated by the massively parallel VORPAL computational framework. The extraction, which provides frequencies to an accuracy of a few part in 10^5, was done by use of a new algorithm [G. R. Werner and J. R. Cary, J. Comp. Phys. 227, 5200 (2008)]. The images for the movie were created using the VisIt graphical package with post processing by POV-Ray. These images and data provide engineers and physicists an understanding of potential cavity performance as it depends on shape without incurring manufacture and measurement costs.

The video can be seen below. If you do not see the visualization, you may need to install a player capable of playing the H.264 video codec on your platform. Tech-X recommends QuickTime for Windows and Macintosh machines, mplayer for Linux. The animation may also be downloaded in both low-resolution and high-resolution formats: