Flat beams in the SLC

The Stanford Linear Collider was designed to operate with round beams; horizontal and vertical emittance made equal in the damping rings. The main motivation was to facilitate the optical matching through beam lines with strong coupling elements like the solenoid spin rotator magnets and the SLC arcs. Tests in 1992 showed that `flat´ beams with a vertical to horizontal emittance ratio of around 1/10 can be successfully delivered to the end of the linac. Techniques developed to measure and control the coupling of the SLC arcs allow these beams to be transported to the Interaction Point (IP). Before flat beams could be used for collisions with polarized electrons, a new method of rotating the electron spin orientation with vertical arc orbit bumps [4] had to be developed Early in the 1993 run, the SLC was switched to `flat´ beam operation. Within a short time the peak luminosity of the previous running cycle was reached and then surpassed. The average daily luminosity is now a factor of about two higher than the best achieved last year. In the following we present an overview of the problems encountered and their solutions for different parts of the SLC