ELEGANT: A flexible SDDS-compliant code for accelerator simulation

ELEGANT (ELEctron Generation ANd Tracking) is the principle accelerator simulation code used at the Advanced Photon Source (APS) for circular and one-pass machines. Capabilities include 6-D tracking using matrices up to third order, canonical integration, and numerical integration. Standard beamline elements are supported, as well as coherent synchrotron radiation, wakefields, rf elements, kickers, apertures, scattering, and more. In addition to tracking with and without errors, ELEGANT performs optimization of tracked properties, as well as computation and optimization of Twiss parameters, radiation integrals, matrices, and floor coordinates. Orbit/trajectory, tune, and chromaticity correction are supported. ELEGANT is fully compliant with the Self Describing Data Sets (SDDS) file protocol, and hence uses the SDDS Toolkit for pre- and post-processing. This permits users to prepare scripts to run the code in a flexible and automated fashion. It is particularly well suited to multistage simulation and concurrent simulation on many workstations. Several examples of complex projects performed with ELEGANT are given, including top-up safety analysis of the APS and design of the APS bunch compressor.