Global Optimization of Beam Profiles for Suppressing the Bump-On-Tail Instability

Abstract

A particle beam with constant intensity that propagates into a plasma triggers a bump-on-tail instability. It has been demonstrated that beam modulation can be used to significantly reduce this instability. However, finding the optimal beam profiles that accomplish this is a complex optimization problem that suffers from an extremely rugged optimization landscape and a relatively high-dimensional parameter space. In this paper, we evaluate a number of optimization algorithms and find that population based methods (in particular, CMA-ES and Differential Evolution) perform best. In particular, we investigate beam profiles where the beam is either completely turned ON or OFF. This configuration is easier to accomplish experimentally, but leads to a higher-dimensional and thus more challenging optimization problem. We obtain ON/OFF beam profiles that reduce the instability by more than 80% and thus perform significantly better than what has been reported in the literature.