A new approach to improving the efficiency of fel oscillator simulations

During the last year we have been benchmarking FEL oscillator simulation codes against the measured performance of the three Jefferson Lab oscillator FELs. While one might think that a full 4D simulation is de facto the best predictor of performance, the simulations are computationally intensive, even when analytical approximations to the electron bunch longitudinal distribution are used. In this presentation we compare the predictions of the 4D FEL interaction codes Genesis and Medusa, in combination with the optical code OPC, with those using a combination of the 2D & 3D versions of these codes, which can be run quickly on a single CPU core desktop computer