This paper introduces Accelerator Toolbox (AT) -a collection of tools to model particle accelerators and beam transport lines in the MATLAB environment. At SSRL, it has become the modeling code of choice for the ongoing design and future operation of the SPEAR 3 synchrotron light source.AT was designed to take advantage of power and simplicity of MATLABcommercially developed environment for technical computing and visualization. Many examples in this paper illustrate the advantages of the AT approach and contrast it with existing accelerator code frameworks.

This paper introduces Accelerator Toolbox (AT) -a collection of tools to model storage rings and beam transport lines in the MATLAB environment. The objective is to illustrate the flexibility and efficiency of the AT-MATLAB framework. The paper discusses three examples of problems that are analyzed frequently in connection with ring-based synchrotron light sources.

BL11, the most recently installed wiggler in the SPEAR storage ring at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory, produces a large nonlinear perturbation of the electron beam dynamics, which was not directly evident in the integrated magnetic field measurements. Measurements of tune shifts with betatron oscillation amplitude and closed orbit shifts were used to characterize the nonlinear fields. Because of the narrow pole width in BL11, the nonlinear fields seen along the wiggling electron trajectory are dramatically different from the magnetic measurements made along a straight line with a stretched wire. This difference explains the tune shift measurements and the observed degradation in dynamic aperture. Because of the relatively large dispersion (1.2 m) at BL11, the nonlinearities particularly reduced the off-energy dynamic aperture. Because of the nature of these nonlinear fields, it is impossible, even theoretically, to cancel them completely with short multipole correctors. Magic finger corrector magnets were built, however, that partially correct the nonlinear perturbation, greatly improving the storage ring performance.

This paper introduces Accelerator Toolbox (AT) -a collection of tools to model storage rings and beam transport lines in the MATLAB environment. The objective is to illustrate the flexibility and efficiency of the AT-MATLAB framework. The paper discusses three examples of problems that are analyzed frequently in connection with ring-based synchrotron light sources.