Simulation studies on the electron cloud build-up in the elements of the LHC Arcs at 6.5 TeV

The formation of electron clouds in the arcs of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been identified as one of the main limitations for the performance of the machine. In particular, the impacting electrons can deposit a significant power on the cold beam screens of the LHC superconducting magnets, which translates into a significant heat load for the cryogenic system. A detailed model of the e-cloud formation in the different elements of the LHC arc half-cell has been developed using the PyECLOUD simulation code. The model includes the main dipole and quadrupole magnets, shorter corrector magnets and drift spaces. Particular care was taken to correctly model the impact of the hotoelectrons produced by the beam synchrotron radiation. For this purpose, we reviewed the available literature on the characterization of the LHC beam screen surface in terms of reflectivity and photoelectron yield and we defined the necessary steps to obtain the photoemission model in the format required in input by the PyECLOUD code. This allowed assessing element by element the impact of the photoemission process on the e-cloud formation. Simulation results could be compared with heat load measurements collected at the LHC during operation with 25 ns bunch spacing.