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The electron cloud (EC) can be formed in the beam pipe of a circular accelerator if the secondary emission yield (SEY) of the inner surface is larger than 1, and it can detrimentally affect the circulating beam. Understanding the underlying physics and defining the scaling laws of this effect is indispensable to steer the upgrade plans of the existing machines and the design of new ones. The single bunch EC instability (ECI) is shown to be strongly affected by the transverse beam size. Transversely, smaller beams going through an electron cloud generate higher electron peak densities and lower the intensity threshold to make the beam unstable. In particular, since higher energy beams have smaller transverse sizes (for equal normalized transverse emittances), the scaling of the ECI threshold with the beam energy turns out to be surprisingly unfavorable.

Electron clouds in the beam pipe of high-energy proton or positron storage rings can give rise to significant incoherent emittance growth, at densities far below the coherent-instability threshold. We identify two responsible mechanisms: namely, (1) a beam particle periodically crosses a resonance and (2) a beam particle periodically crosses a region of the bunch where its motion is linearly unstable. Formation of halo or beam-core blow up, respectively, are the result. Key ingredients for both processes are synchrotron motion and electron-induced tune shift. The mechanisms considered provide a possible explanation for reduced beam lifetime and emittance growth observed at several operating accelerators. Similar phenomena are likely to occur in other two-stream systems.