A simple, flexible technique for RF cavity wake-field calculations

Abstract It is typical in the accelerator field to model machine components, especially RF cavities, as parallel RLC resonators. To properly model wake-fields, knowledge of the time-domain voltage resulting from beam excitation is often necessary. While analytical and quasi-analytical expressions are available to accomplish this for common bunch distributions such as the Gaussian, analogous results for less standard distributions can be difficult or computationally-taxing to obtain using direct methods, which opens the door for the development of a more generalized technique. In this paper, a formulation is created that allows for the simple computation of the time-domain voltage waveform of an RLC resonator. The formulation uses the Cauchy Residue Theorem to extract the convolution result from the Fourier Domain, and if current distribution Fourier Transform has no poles, knowledge of its value is only required at one specific evaluation point. This greatly simplifies the computation of the time domain voltage for a large amount of bunch distributions both common and uncommon. Accuracy considerations for this technique and the approximation of accelerator components as RLC resonators are also discussed, resulting the development of a figure of merit for quantifying the robustness of this type of approximation.