The drive beam pulse compression system for the CLIC RF power source

The Compact Linear Collider (CLIC) is a high energy (0.5 to 5 TeV) e^± linear collider that uses a high-current electron beam (the drive beam) for 30 GHz RF power production by the two-beam acceleration (TBA) method. Recently, a new cost-effective and efficient generation scheme for the drive beam has been developed. A fully-loaded normal-conducting linac operating at lower frequency (937 MHz) generates and accelerates the drive beam bunches, and a compression system composed of a delay-line and two combiner rings produces the proper drive beam time structure for RF power generation in the drive beam decelerator. In this paper, a preliminary design of the whole compression system is presented. In particular, the fundamental issue of preserving the bunch quality along the complex is studied and its impact on the beam parameters and on the various system components is assessed. A first design of the rings and delay-line lattice, including path length tuning chicanes, injection and extraction regions is also presented together with the simulation results of the beam longitudinal dynamics