Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

We report on the lattice design of the Next Linear Collider (NLC) damping rings. The damping rings are required to provide low emittance electron and positron bunch trains to the NLC linacs, at a rate of 120 Hz. We present an optical design, based on a theoretical minimum emittance (TME) lattice, to produce the required normalized extracted beam emittances gex = 3 mm-mrad and gey = 0.02 mm mrad. An assessment of dynamic aperture and non-linear effects is given. The positron pre-damping ring, required to reduce the emittance of the positron beam such that it may be accepted by a main damping ring, is also described.