Electron cloud meeting #14, 23-24/07/2014 Participants: H. Bartosik, R. Cimino, J. Hulsman, G. Iadarola, K. Li, E. Métral, L. Mether, A. Romano, G. Rumolo, M. Taborelli Excused: Matters arising and general information (G. Rumolo) Follow up from the minutes of last meeting and new information: The PhD project for multipacting in RF structures was prepared and financing (50% HL-LHC and 50% LIU-SPS) has been requested. A synergy between scrubbing studies on the test bench and the study of electron cloud in crab cavities has been established and the project should attack both under the LIU-SPS and HL-LHC umbrellas. Lotta Mether will give a talk on “Two-stream instabilities in low emittance rings” at the LER Workshop in Frascati (15-17 September, 2014). A rehearsal is foreseen within the electron cloud meeting framework sometime early in September. LESEY laboratory measurements and SEY parametrisation (R. Cimino) Two methods are used for measuring the SEY of a sample in laboratory. The common set up consists of an electron gun shooting electrons on a sample and the ratio between emitted and impinging electrons on the sample needs to be determined. Both methods rely first of all on the measurement of the electron current from the electron gun used to bombard the sample. This is usually done with a Faraday cup. Then, in one case the current from the sample is measured, which is the incoming current minus the current of emitted electrons. With the second method, the emitted electrons are directly measured after reaching a hemispherical biased collector surrounding the sample. Measurements are done at different energies by varying the energy of the electrons emitted by the gun. All these SEY measurements are done with low electron currents to avoid scrubbing the sample while different energies are scanned through. The main difficulties of measuring SEY at low energy are the electromagnetic perturbations on the electrons before they land on the sample (e.g. the influence of the earth magnetic field or the field from ion pumps to have UHV conditions around the sample), the divergence of the low energy electron beam and the gun capability of producing electron beams in the few eV range with low energy spreads. One of the advantages of the first measurement method is that the gun can be placed closer to the sample. This reduces the influence of spurious electromagnetic fields as well as the divergence of the electron beam before it reaches the sample. The problem of the gun performance in the low energy range is usually circumvented by producing higher energy electrons with the gun and then slowing them down with a negative bias before they hit the sample. From the measurements published in 2004 in PRL, it seemed that low energy electrons tend to have a high probability of elastic reflection. More recently Kaganovich et al. (ECLOUD’12) have suggested that both calculations and old measurements show actually that SEY tends to vanish for low energy electrons. SEY measurements were repeated on an atomically clean Cu sample with careful setting of the energy scale. Since measurements are done on a biased sample, obviously electrons with energies below eVbias will not reach the sample resulting into an SEY equal to 1. This is to be interpreted as a feature of the measurement technique. Besides, there is also a blurred zone for electrons with energy around eVbias because the measurement suffers from the existence of an energy spread for the incoming electron beam. Here part of the electrons will be repelled by the bias voltage while others will reach the sample and produce secondaries. With these measurements, the very low SEY at low energy is recovered on the atomically clean sample. Also the width of the band of transition to the expected SEY=1 at very low energy is consistent with the energy spread from the electron gun and scales with it. Correcting the measurements in this transition band, the convergence to values close to zero of the measured SEY is recovered in the low energy range for this specific sample. However measurements on the “as received” sample show that real measurable SEY curve does not converge to zero for this type of surface and actually plateaus already for energies higher than the bias energy (below 50 eV). This behavior has been shown to have a significant impact in the predicted electron cloud build up thresholds in the LHC arc dipoles, for instance. Practically, there is a big difference between the behavior of a pure metal and a technical surface. Repeated measurements on a sample scrubbed in laboratory have shown that the low energy part of the curve seems not to change its shape with the scrubbing (i.e. while the SEY is lowered by the electron bombardment). This result is still preliminary. Using the measurements above one could think of either using a new parametrization for the low energy behavior of the SEY curve, or alternatively feed experimental curves directly into future PyECLOUD simulations. Update on current activities (A. Romano) The PS electron detector in MU98 was further analyzed by simulations The radial position of the beam was scanned in order to find out for which position we may expect to see a signal and when the signal could even disappear due to stripe formation outside of the region covered by the monitor. The idea will be then to study the electron signal while doing radial steering and measure the expected effect on the signal. Scanning the beam position by +/- 3cm around the nominal orbit, the total electron flux through the chamber is found not to be much affected by the position of the beam in the chamber, but obviously only on the SEY. The electron flux through the holes depends on both the SEY and the beam radial position. In particular, depending on the SEY, the signal could quickly disappear if the beam is between -3 cm and its nominal orbit. For an SEY of 1.6 (typical PS values from past experience), the signal drops when the beam is moved more than 1 cm inwards (i.e. away from the detector), while it is again recovered when the beam is moved back towards its nominal orbit or even farther outwards. Next step will be to perform both bunch intensity and length scans to predict what we could expect at different points in the 25 ns beam production cycle as well as with different intensities injected from the PSB. For the moment the electron signals are still displayed in e/m, but this will be soon updated in uA (the conversion is not trivial due to the geometry of the detector) AOB None. Adjournment Next electron cloud meeting will be taking place in August 2014. GR, 29/07/2014