Experimental Program for the CLIC test facility 3 test beam line

The CLIC Test Facility 3 Test Beam Line is the first prototype for the CLIC drive beam decelerator. Stable transport of the drive beam under deceleration is a mandatory component in the CLIC two-beam scheme. In the Test Beam Line more than 50% of the total energy will be extracted from a 150 MeV, 28 A electron drive beam, by the use of 16 power extraction and transfer structures. A number of experiments are foreseen to investigate the drive beam characteristics under deceleration in the Test Beam Line, including beam stability, beam blow up and the efficiency of the power extraction. General benchmarking of decelerator simulation and theory studies will also be performed. Specially designed instrumentation including precision BPMs, loss monitors and a time-resolved spectrometer dump will be used for the experiments. This paper describes the experimental program foreseen for the Test Beam Line, including the relevance of the results for the CLIC decelerator studies.