Progress in Mastering Electron Clouds at the Large Hadron Collider

During the second operational run of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) a bunch spacing of 25 ns was used for the first time for luminosity production. With such a spacing, electron cloud effects are much more severe than with the 50-ns spacing, which had been used in the previous run. Beam-induced conditioning of the beam chambers mitigated the e-cloud formation to an extent that allowed an effective exploitation of 25 ns beams. Nevertheless, even after years of conditioning, e-cloud effects remained very visible, affecting beam stability and beam quality, and generating strong heat loads on the beam screens of the superconducting magnets with puzzling features. In preparation for the High Luminosity LHC upgrade, remarkable progress has been made in the modeling of the e-cloud formation and of its influence on beam stability, slow losses and emittance blow up, as well as in the understanding of the underlying behavior of the beam-chamber surface. In this contribution, we describe the main experimental observations from beam operation, the outcome of laboratory analysis conducted on beam screens extracted after the run, and the main advancements in the modeling of these phenomena.