Design, Manufacturing and Testing of the CTF3 Tail Clipper Kicker

The goal of the present CLIC Test Facility (CTF3) is to demonstrate the technical feasibility of specific key issues of the CLIC scheme. The extracted drive beam from the combiner ring (CR), a pulse of 35 A magnitude and 140 ns duration, is sent to the new CLic EXperimental area (CLEX). A Tail Clipper (TC) kicker is required, in the CR to CLEX transfer line, to allow the duration of the beam pulse to be adjusted: the unwanted bunches are kicked into a collimator. The TC must have a fast field rise-time, of not more than 5 ns, in order to minimize uncontrolled beam loss. Striplines are used for the TC: to establish the required fields, the applied pulse wave front must fully propagate along the striplines. To reduce the wave front propagation time, the overall length of the stripline assembly is sub-divided into 4 sections. The TC has been designed with the aid of detailed numerical modelling: the stripline cross-section and coaxial-to-stripline transitions were carefully optimized using a 3D code. The results of simulations and the measured behaviour of the striplines are presented; in addition measured current pulses are shown.