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Electron clouds produced inside a particle accelerator vacuum chamber by the passage of the beam can compromise the operation of the accelerator. The build up of electron clouds can produce strong transverse and longitudinal beam instabilities which in turn can lead to high levels of beam loss often requiring the accelerator to be run below its design specification. To study the phenomena of electron clouds at the ISIS Proton Synchrotron, a Micro-Channel Plate (MCP) based electron cloud detector has been developed. The detector is based on the Retarding Field Analyser (RFA) design and consists of a retarding grid, which provides energy analysis of the electron signal, and a MCP assembly placed in front of the collector plate. The MCP assembly provides a current gain over the range 300 to 25K, thereby increasing the signal to noise ratio and dynamic range of the measurements. In this paper, we describe the lab based experiment used to test our detector using a low energy electron gun. Results from our MCP based detector installed in the ISIS accelerator ring are discussed and compared to a RFA detector, installed at the same location, which has no MCP fitted.
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