EGUN: An electron optics and gun design program

The name EGUN has become commonly associated with the program also known as the SLAC Electron Trajectory Program. This document is an updated version of SLAC-226, published in 1979. The program itself has had substantial upgrading since then, but only a few new features are of much concern to the user. Most of the improvements are internal and are intended to improve speed or accuracy. EGUN is designed to compute trajectories of charged particles in electrostatic and magnetostatic fields, including the effects of space charge and self-magnetic fields. Starting options include Child's Law conditions on cathodes of various shapes, as well as used specified initial conditions. Either rectangular or cylindrical symmetry may be used. In the new jargon, the program is a 2-1/2 dimension code meaning 2-D in all fields and 3-D in all particle motion. A Poisson's Equation Solver is used to find the electrostatic fields by using difference equations derived from the boundary conditions. Magnetic fields are to be specified externally, by the user, by using one of several methods including data from another program or arbitrary configurations of coils. This edition of the documentation also covers the program EGN87c, which is a recently developed version of EGUNmore » designed to be used on the newer models of personal computers, small main frames, work stations, etc. The EGN87c program uses the programming language C which is very transportable so the program should operate on any system that supports C. Plotting routines for most common PC monitors are included, and the capability to make hard copy plots on dot-matrix printer-plotters is provided. 18 refs., 7 figs.« less