Unique radiation problems associated with the SLAC Linear Collider

The SLAC Linear Collider (SLC) is a variation of a new class of linear colliders whereby two linear accelerators are aimed at each other to collide intense bunches of electrons and positrons together. Conventional storage rings are becoming ever more costly as the energy of the stored beams increases such that the cost of two linear colliders per GeV is less than that of electron-positron storage rings at cm energies above about 100 GeV. The SLC being built at SLAC is designed to achieve a center-of-mass energy of 100 GeV by accelerating intense bunches of particles, both electrons and positrons, in the SLAC linac and transporting them along two different arcs to a point where they are focused to a small radius and made to collide head on. The SLC has two main goals. The first is to develop the physics and technology of linear colliders. The other is to achieve center-of-mass energies above 90 GeV in order to investigate the unification of the weak and electromagnetic interactions in the energy range above 90 GeV; (i.e., Z0, etc.). This note discusses a few of the special problems that were encountered by the Radiation Physics group at SLAC during the design and construction of the SLAC Linear Collider. The nature of these problems is discussed along with the methods employed to solve them