SLAC, Menlo Park, California
Fermilab, Batavia, Illinois
The International Linear Collider will be the largest most complicated accelerator ever built. For this reason extensive work is being done early in the design phase to ensure that it will be reliable enough. This includes gathering failure mode data from existing accelerators and simulating the failures and repair times of the ILC. This simulation has been written in a general fashion using MATLAB and could be used for other accelerators. Results from the simulation tool have been used in making some of the major ILC design decisions and an unavailability budget has been developed.
SLAC, Menlo Park, California
Stanford University, Stanford, Califormia
The NLC Test Accelerator (NLCTA) at SLAC was built to address various beam dynamics issues for the Next Linear Collider. An S-Band RF gun has been installed with diagnostics and a low energy spectrometer (LES) at 6 MeV together with a large-angle extraction line at 60 MeV. This is followed by a matching section, buncher and final focus for the laser acceleration experiment, E163. The laser-electron interaction area is followed by a broad range (2\%), high resolving power (104) spectrometer (HES) for electron bunch analysis. Emittance compensating solenoids and the LES are used to tune for best operating point and match to the linac. Optical symmetries in the design of the 25.5° extraction line provide 1:1 phase space transfer without use of sextupoles for a large, 6D phase space volume and range of input conditions. Spot sizes of a few microns at the IP (or HES object) allow tests of microscale structures as well as high resolving power at the image of the HES. Tolerances, tuning sensitivities and diagnostics are discussed together with the latest commissioning results and their comparison to design expectations.