13.3 Highlights of What’s New in Version 2023.2

Here is a summary of what’s changed since release 2023.1. Historical change logs are collected in Section 13.

13.3.1 Bug Fixes for Elements

• A memory leak was fixed in the WAKE element for multi-bunch mode. This was reported by forum user Seb_Wilkes.

13.3.2 Bug Fixes for Commands

• A bug was fixed in the obstruction_data command that would cause a crash if a second command was given.

13.3.3 New and Modified Elements

• The PARTICLE_OUTPUT_FILE file from BRAT elements now includes the direction cosines.

13.3.4 New and Modified Commands

• The ion_effects command now supports use of a Poisson solver for computation of fields from ions. This was implemented by J. Calvey (APS), with assistance from Y. P. Sun and M. Borland (both APS). It uses the widely-available FFTW library.
• The bpm_centroids output from the run_setup command how includes two columns giving the BPM weights.
• The optimization_variable command now accepts step sizes as a function of the allowed range, using the fractional_step_size parameter.
• The optimization_setup command supports “resetting” of optimization variables upon restarts of the algorithm based on a threshold. This helps prune variables that have a small effect on the outcome.
• The loss output file from touschek_scatter now contains several parameters to help more easily identify the scattering location. This was inspired by a question from forum user blanco-garcia.
• The vary_element command now has a disable parameter. If set to a non-zero value, the command is ignored.

13.3.5 Changes to Related Programs and Files

The elegant distribution includes many programs and scripts that perform computations with elegant output data, provide interfaces with other programs, or prepare data for use with elegant. These are listed in Section 8.

Changes to these tools in this release include

• Fixed a bug in ibsEmittance that resulted in the emittance ratio being forced to 1 when the -emityInput option was used.
• ibsEmittance has a new option, -fixEmity, that allows forcing the vertical emittance to a constant value when finding equilibrium parameters in a ring. This was requested by forum user Seb_Wilkes.