Emittance growth caused by electron cloud below the "fast-TMCI" threshold: numerical noise or true physics?

Simulations show a persisting slow emittance growth for electron cloud densities below the threshold of the fast Transverse Mode Coupling type instability, which could prove important for proton beams with negligible radiation damping, such as in the LHC. We report on a variety of studies performed to quantify the contributions to the simulated emittance growth from numerical noise in the PIC module and from an artificial resonance excitation due to the finite number of kicks per turn applied for modeling the cloud-bunch interaction.