First Experimental Results with the Clic Drive Beam Phase Feedforward Prototype at the Clic Test Facility Ctf3∗

The two-beam acceleration scheme envisaged for CLIC will require a high degree of phase stability between two beams at the drive beam decelerator sections, to allow efficient acceleration of the main beam. There will be up to 48 such decelerator sections for the full 3 TeV design, and each decelerator section will be instrumented with a feed-forward system to correct the drive beam phase to a precision of 0.2 degrees at 12 GHz relative to the main beam, using a kicker system around a four-bend chicane. A prototype system has been developed and tested at the CLIC Test Facility (CTF3) complex, where the beam phase is measured upstream of the combiner ring and corrected with two kickers in a dog-leg chicane just upstream of the CLEX facility, where the resulting phase change is measured. This prototype is designed to demonstrate correction of a portion of the CTF3 bunch train to the level required for CLIC, with a bandwidth of greater than 30 MHz, and within a latency constraint of 380 ns as set by the beam time-of-flight through the combiner ring complex. A description of the hardware will be given and initial results from the first phase of the experiment will be presented.