Beam Loading Compensation in the Main Linac of CLIC

Compensation of multi-bunch beam loading is of great importance in the main linac of the Compact Linear Collider (CLIC). The bunch-to-bunch energy variation has to stay below 1 part in 1000. In CLIC, the RF power is obtained by decelerating a drive beam which is formed by merging a number of short bunch trains. A promising scheme for tackling beam loading in the main linac is based on varying the lengths of the bunch trains in the drive beam. The scheme and its expected performance are presented.