On-Line Dispersion Free Steering for the Main Linac of CLIC

For future linear colliders as well as for light sources, ground motion effects are a severe problem for the accelerator performance. After a few minutes, orbit feedback systems are not sufficient to mitigate all ground motion effects and additional long term methods will have to be deployed. In this paper, the long term ground motion effects in the main linac of the Compact Linear Collider (CLIC) are analysed via simulation studies. The primary growth of the projected emittance is identified to originate from chromatic dilutions due to dispersive beam orbits. To counter this effect, an on-line identification algorithm is applied to measure the dispersion parasitically. This dispersion estimate is used to correct the beam orbit with an iterative dispersion free steering algorithm. The presented results are not only of interest for the CLIC project, but for all linacs in which the dispersive orbit has to be corrected over time.