Recent Progress at the Stanford Linear Collider*

A status report on SLC commissioning is given, with special emphasis on recent progress in the Arcs and Final Focus. INTRODUCTION The Stanford Linear Collider (SLC) has two main goals 11). The first is the production of high luminosity electron-positron collisions for studying the physics of the i”. The second is to test linear colliders as a new approach towards future high-energy machines. Circular colliders, where counter-rotating electrons and positrons are stored, are not easily extrapolated to very high energy because of copious synchrotron radiation emitted in the bends. Both size and cost scale [2] as E2 for an optimized design. Linear colliders avoid this by accelerating beams in linacs to the desired energy and by aiming them at each other on each pulse. More favorable scaling is predicted, but not fully established, and new problems exist. Besides the acceleration mechanism, a special challenge is the small collision point beam size needed to make up in the luminosity for low crossing rate. At the SLC, it is about 2 pm in radius. Both elaborate optics and emittance reductions via radiation damping are required. Considerable effort is also needed to preserve and control phase-space through the system. The SLC, serving to explore such problems, is an important learning experience. PROJECT OVERVIEW