Limitations of Interaction-point Spot-size Tuning at the Slc

At the Stanford Linear Collider (SLC), the interactionpoint spot size is minimized by repeatedly correcting, for both beams, various low-order optical aberrations, such as dispersion, waist position or coupling. These corrections are performed about every 8 hours, by minimizing the IP spot size while exciting different orthogonal combinations of final-focus magnets. The spot size itself is determined by measuring the beam deflection angle as a function of the beam-beam separation. Additional information is derived from the energy loss due to beamstrahlung and from luminosity-related signals. In the 1996 SLC run, the typical corrections were so large as to imply a 20–40% average luminosity loss due to residual uncompensated or fluctuating tunable aberrations. In this paper, we explore the origin of these large tuning corrections and study possible mitigations for the next SLC run.