Beam-Induced Multipactoring and Electron-Cloud Effects in Particle Accelerators

In the beam pipe of high-energy proton or positron accelerators an “electron cloud” can be generated by a variety of processes, e.g. by residual-gas ionization, by photoemission from synchrotron radiation, and, most importantly, by secondary emission via a beam-induced multipactoring process. The electron cloud commonly leads to a degradation of the beam vacuum by several orders of magnitude, to fast beam instabilities, to beam-size increases, and to fast or slow beam losses. At the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the cloud electrons could also give rise to an additional heat load inside cold superconducting magnets. In addition to the direct heat deposition from incoherently moving electrons, a potential “magnetron effect” has been conjectured, where electrons would radiate coherently when moving in a strong magnetic field under the simultaneous influence of a beam-induced electric “wake” field that may become resonant with the cyclotron frequency. Electron-cloud effects are already being observed with LHC-type beam in the lower-energy LHC injector complex. In this paper, we review the characteristics of electron clouds in particle accelerators, key surface properties, electron-cloud diagnostics and observations, microwave transmission measurements and magnetron effect, electron-cloud mitigation, simulations, and open questions.