Sensitivity Analysis for the CLIC Damping Ring Inductive Adder

The 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 pre-damping rings and damping rings will produce, through synchrotron radiation, 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 generators for the damping ring kickers must provide extremely flat, high-voltage pulses. The specifications for the extraction kickers of the CLIC damping rings are particularly demanding: the flattop of the output pulse must be 160 ns duration, 12.5 kV and 250 A, with a combined ripple and droop of not more than ±0.02 %. An inductive adder allows the use of different modulation techniques and is therefore a very promising approach to meeting the specifications. PSpice has been utilised to carry out a sensitivity analysis of the predicted output pulse to the value of both individual and groups of circuit components: these results are used to define component performance requirements, nominal values and tolerances. This paper reports the simulation results as well as tests and measurements of the various candidate components, including semiconductor switches, pulse capacitors and transformer cores.