Chaos and emittance growth due to nonlinear interactions in a circular accelerator

Incoherent emittance growth caused by a strong nonlinear interaction between beam and electron cloud is discussed. This emittance growth arises from nonlinear diffusion related to chaos and resonances, and strongly depends on the number of degrees of freedom of the interacting system. A simple model, in which beam particles interact with a fixed round charge distribution, is used to study the mechanism of the emittance growth. The same discussion can be applied to the emittance growth due to beam-beam interactions in colliders and space charge effects in low energy proton rings