VUV photoemission studies of candidate LHC vacuum chamber materials

In the context of future accelerators and, in particular, the beam vacuum of the LargeHadron Collider (LHC), a 27 km circumference proton collider to be built at CERN, VUVsynchrotron radiation (SR) has been used to study both qualitatively and quantitatively candidatevacuum chamber materials. Emphasis is given to show that angle and energy resolvedphotoemission is an extremely powerful tool to address important issues relevant to the LHC, suchas the emission of electrons that contribute to the creation of an electron cloud which may causeserious beam instabilities. Here we present not only the measured photoelectron yields (PY)from the proposed materials, prepared on an industrial scale, but also the energy and, in some cases,the angular dependence of the emitted electrons when excited with either a white light (WL)spectrum, simulating that in the arcs of the LHC or monochromatic light in the photon energy rangeof interest. The effects on the materials examined of WL irradiation and/or ion sputtering,simulating the SR and ion bombardment expected in the LHC, were investigated. The studiedsamples exhibited significant modifications, in terms of electron emission, when exposed to the WLspectrum from the BESSY TGM7 beamline. Moreover, annealing and ion bombardment alsoinduce substantial changes to the surface thereby indicating that such surfaces would not have aconstant electron emission during machine operation. Such characteristics may be an importantissue to define the surface properties of the LHC vacuum chamber material and are presented indetail for the various samples analysed.