Experimental demonstration of a global dispersion-free steering correction at the new linac test facility at SLAC

The performance of future linear colliders will depend critically on beam-based alignment and feedback systems. In ILC and CLIC it is planned to perform dispersion-free steering in the main linacs. To this end the beams are accelerated with different gradients to evaluate the dispersion. The steering is performed by minimizing the average offset of the different beams in the beam position monitors and, at the same time, the difference between the beam trajectories. The experimental verification of the dispersion-free steering algorithm is essential to prove its effectiveness and to prepare the commissioning of such machines. The algorithm should take an orbit measurement at every cycle (train to train), estimate the correction from this information, and, from the system response matrices, apply the correction. We have successfully tested dispersion-free steering at FACET, including an adaptive system-identification algorithm, where the system response matrix is measured dynamically and automatically.