A Community Accelerator Lattice Standard

An effort to create a standard to promote lattice information exchange for particle accelerators.

Scope

As part of this effort, we focus on the physical layout and properties of a machine. This excludes description of tracking of particles including collective effects.

Roadmap

1. Reach out to the community (continuous)

2. Request for documentation:

   • Goal: document how various accelerator modeling codes already do for their lattices.
   • Organizers: Create a template.
     • element parameters
     • lines/beamlines: how are elements distributed
     • example of a facility/lattice
   • Community: to fill out a template per existing code.

3. Request for proposals: how would we like to describe lattices and individual elements in terms of physical line & element properties?

   • Goal: write down as text document (standard)
     • use a simple bullet point document, e.g., with name of element, purpose, properties and alternates
   • Form community consensus on:
     • elements: which properties to put in the standard we are developing; which alternate descriptions do we need for the same element?
     • lines/beamlines: which descriptions (e.g., sub-lines, channels/repetitions, line order inversion, physical line inversion, constants/variables to scale lines, etc.) do we need in the standard we are developing or which ones belong in implementations

4. Request for proposals: how would we like to store & exchange lattices in the 21st century?

   • Goal: document advise to implementers.
   • How can we programming language agnostic store and exchange lattices?
     • examples for storage formats: TOML, YAML, JSON, XML, ... (with the right framework, one can support them all)
     • examples for frameworks (import/export/validation): pydantic (Python), StructTypes.jl/Parameters.jl in Julia, etc.