Speaker
Description
AWAKE is a proof-of-principle experiment to study proton driven plasma wakefield acceleration at CERN. Highly relativistic proton bunches (e.g. available at CERN) carry large amounts of energy (>20 kJ). They have the potential to excite ~GV/m plasma wakefields that can accelerate a witness bunch to TeV energies in a single plasma stage. The proton bunch length is on the order of 10 cm; much longer than the plasma electron wavelength at the densities needed to achieve GV/m field amplitudes. Thus, AWAKE relies on the transverse seeded self-modulation to modulate the long bunch into a train of microbunches. This microbunch train then resonantly drives high amplitude wakefields. In this contribution, we discuss the experimental results of AWAKE Run 1 (2016-2018) including: acceleration of externally injected 18.6 MeV electrons to GeV energies in 10m of plasma.
