Preliminary Design of an Inductive Adder for CLIC Damping Rings

The Compact Linear Collider (CLIC) study is exploring the scheme for an electron-positron collider with high luminosity and a nominal centre-of-mass energy of 3 TeV. The CLIC damping rings will produce ultra-low emittance beam, with high bunch charge, necessary for the luminosity performance of the collider. To limit the beam emittance blow-up due to oscillations, the pulse power modulators for the damping rings kickers must provide extremely flat, high-voltage, pulses: specifications call for a 160 ns duration flattop of 12.5 kV, 250 A, with a combined ripple and droop of not more than ±0.02 %. A solid-state modulator, the inductive adder, is a very promising approach to meeting the demanding specifications; this topology allows the use of both digital and analogue modulation. To effectively use modulation techniques to achieve such low ripple and droop requires an in-depth knowledge of the behaviour of the solid-state switching components and their gate drivers, as well as a good understanding of the overall circuit behaviour. This paper describes the initial design of the inductive adder.