Monitoring the progress of LHC electron-cloud scrubbing by benchmarking simulations and pressure-rise observations

Electron bombardment of a surface has been proven to reduce drastically the secondary electron yield of a material. This technique, known as scrubbing, provides a mean to suppress electron cloud build-up and its undesired effects (e.g. vacuum pressure rise, heat load, beam instabilities) in particle accelerators operating with intense beams. Its effectiveness has been already observed at the LHC. In this paper we present the latest observations on the vacuum chamber conditioning and a proposal to optimize the scrubbing process by means of the map formalism.