Study of Bunch Instabilities by the Nonlinear Vlasov-Fokker-Planck Equation

Instabilities of the bunch form in storage rings may be induced through the wake field arising from corrugations in the vacuum chamber, or from the wake and precursor fields due to coherent synchrotron radiation (CSR). For over forty years the linearized Vlasov equation has been applied to calculate the threshold in current for an instability, and the initial growth rate. Increasing interest in nonlinear aspects of the motion has led to numerical solutions of the nonlinear Vlasov equation, augmented with Fokker-Planck terms to describe incoherent synchrotron radiation in the case of electron storage rings. This opens the door to much deeper studies of coherent instabilities, revealing a rich variety of nonlinear phenomena. Recent work on this topic by the author and collaborators is reviewed.