Cancelled IIHE invited seminar: The AWAKE Experiment at CERN

by Dr Ans Pardons (CERN)

Friday 10 May 2019, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Brussels

Jean Sacton Seminar room (1G003) (IIHE (ULB-VUB))

AWAKE is an accelerator R&D experiment at CERN to demonstrate for the first time ever plasma wakefield acceleration of electrons in wakefields driven by a proton bunch and, in the future, take advantage of the large energy stored in the proton bunch to reach very high energy gain in a single plasma. During 2016 and 2017, AWAKE observed the strong modulation of high-energy proton bunches in plasma; the results represent the first-ever demonstration of strong plasma wakes generated by proton beams. In 2018 AWAKE demonstrated for the first time the acceleration of externally injected electrons to multi-GeV energy levels in the proton driven plasma wakefields, a result recently published in Nature. The aims of AWAKE Run 2 (2021 - 2024) are to achieve high-charge bunches of electrons accelerated to high energy, about 10~GeV, while maintaining beam quality through the plasma and showing that the process is scalable. The final goal by the end of AWAKE Run 2 is to be in a position to use the AWAKE scheme for particle physics experiments.