Interactive visualization of particle beams for accelerator design

Abstract. We describe a hybrid data-representation and rendering technique for visualizing large-scale particle data generated from numerical modeling of beam dynamics. The basis of the technique is mixing volume rendering and point ren-dering according to particle density distribution, visibility, and the user’s instruc-tion. A hierarchical representation of the data is created on a parallel computer, allowing real-time partitioning into high-density areas for volume rendering, and low-density areas for point rendering. This allows the beam to be interactively vi-sualized while preserving the fine structure usually visible only with slow point-based rendering techniques.