Comissioning of the decelerator test beam line in CTF3

The CLIC Test Facility (CTF3) at CERN was constructed by the CTF3 collaboration to study the feasibility of the concepts for a compact linear collider. The test beam line (TBL) recently added to the CTF3 machine was designed to study the CLIC decelerator beam dynamics and 12 GHz power production. The beam line consists of a FODO lattice with high precision BPM’s and quadrupoles on movers for precise beam alignment. A total of 16 Power Extraction and Transfer Structures (PETS) will be installed in between the quadrupoles to extract 12 GHz power from the drive beam provided by the CTF3 machine. The CTF3 drive beam with a bunchtrain length of 140 ns, 12 GHz bunch repetition frequency and an average current over the train of up to 28 A will be injected into the test beam line. Each PETS structure will produce 135 MW of 12 GHz power at nominal current. The beam will have lost more than 50 % of its initial energy of 150 MeV at the end of the beam line and will contain particles with energies between 65 MeV and 150 MeV. The beam line is completely installed and the PETS structures will be successively added until the end of 2011. The paper will describe the first results obtained during commissioning of the beam line and the first PETS prototype.