High Current Beam Dynamics in an Ess SC Linac

Three alternative designs of the European Spallation Source (ESS) high energy linac are described. The most promising ones are either a normalconducting (nc) coupled cavity linac (CCL) up tofinal energy or a change at 407 MeV to only one group of 6 cell superconducting (sc) elliptical cavities. Fully 3d Monte Carlo simulations are presented for both options, optimized for reduced halo formation at the linac end. For the error free matched case, especially the halo formation in the longitudinal plane is more pronounced for the hybrid solution with its superconducting cavities, caused by the unavoidable phase slippage, but still quite well acceptable for loss free ring injection. Simulations however for a 30% mismatched dense core, surrounded in addition by 1.5% halo particles are showing few particles with very large amplitudes even in real space. This case represents halo formation in front to end simulations, caused by current fluctuations, filamented RFQ output distribution and enhanced by accumulated field errors.