AWAKE: development of a plasma wakefield accelerator driven by a long proton bunch, beam plasma interaction studies, and possible applications to particle physics / P. Muggli

by Patric Muggli

Monday 10 Nov 2025, 16:00 → 17:00 Europe/Zurich

WBGB/019

Plasma-based accelerators driven by a laser pulse or a charged particle bunch have shown their ability to accelerate electrons with very large gradient (>30GeV/m), producing 10 to 42GeV particles.

AWAKE at CERN aims to take advantage of the high energy per proton (SPS 400GeV and LHC 7TeV) and per bunch (19 and 120kJ) to drive wakefields in

10+meter plasmas. These bunches are long (~180ps rms) and their self-modulation (SM) is necessary to drive accelerating wakefields with amplitude in the GV/m range.

I will introduce AWAKE and summarize experimental results obtained so far that include: seeding and control of the SM process, measurements of many of its parameters, acceleration to the GeV-level of externally-injected, test electrons, and observation of the hose and filamentation instabilities. These show that the self-modulator is well understood.

I will outline plans to produce 50-100GeV electron bunches with parameters suitable for possible particle physics and strong-field QED experiments. These include a 10m-long self-modulator plasma, a 150MeV electron injector linac, and an accelerator plasma, first 10m-long for external injection experiments, and then extended to demonstrate scalability of the plasma source and of the acceleration process.