Systematic approach to damping ring design

A design process is described for damping rings in a linear collider where the competing requirements of small equilibrium emittance and fast damping of the injected phase space are needed. A systematic approach to the determ ination of the basic ring parameters is described. In addition, qualitative consideration is given to minimizing the system cost. The approximate inte rdependencies of the various lattice parameters are derived and arguments f or the parameter choices are presented. In addition, many useful expression s are derived for a theoretical minimum emittance lattice. The design of th e damping rings for the Next Linear Collider design are used as examples th roughout.