Beam-based beamline element alignment for the main linac of the 380 GeV stage of CLIC

The extremely small vertical beam size required at the interaction point of future linear colliders, such as the Compact Linear Collider (CLIC), calls for a very small vertical emittance. The strong wakefields in the high frequency 12 GHz CLIC accelerating structures set tight tolerances on the alignment of the main linac’s beamline elements and on the correction of the beam orbit through them in order to maintain a small emittance growth. This paper presents the emittance growth due to each type of beamline element misalignment in the designed 380 GeV centre-of-mass energy first-stage of CLIC, and the emittance growth following a series of beam-based alignment (BBA) procedures. The BBA techniques used are one-to-one steering, followed by dispersion free steering and finally accelerating structure alignment using wakefield monitors.