Recent Progress in a Beam-Beam Simulation Code for Circular Hadron Machines

While conventional tracking codes can readily provide higher-order optical quantities and give an estimate of dynamic apertures, they are unable to provide directly measurable quantities such as lifetimes and loss rates. The particle tracking framework Plibb aims at modeling a storage ring with sufficient accuracy and a sufficiently high number of turns and in the presence of beam-beam interactions to allow for an estimate of these quantities. We provide a description of new features of the codes; we also describe a novel method of treating chromaticity in ring sections in a symplectic fashion