On 21 October 2015, the SPS and PS Experiments Committee (SPSC) has visited the experimental area of the Advanced Proton-Driven Plasma Wakefield Acceleration Experiment AWAKE.

Plasma Wakefield acceleration is a rapidly developing field which appears to be a promising candidate technology for future high-energy accelerators. The AWAKE experiment has the the aim to demonstrate that protons can be used to generate powerful wakefields to accelerate an electron beam in a single plasma section. With this technique, accelerator gradients hundreds of times higher than those used in current systems, might be reached.

Members of the SPSC in the AWAKE service tunnel

The experiment is located in the tunnel previously used by the CNGS facility, and the AWAKE collaboration - 16 institutes from all around the world - with strong support from many CERN teams is completing the service installation phase.

View into the transferline bringing the protons from the SPS to AWAKE

Over about 18 months of hard work, the teams have cleared the old CNGS area—leaving only the infrastructure that will be reused by AWAKE—and have modified the services to meet AWAKE’s needs. “We dismantled 100 metres of the proton beam line, completed the civil engineering needed to house the new electron and laser beam lines, removed several kilometres of old cables, and installed some 100 kilometres of new cables,” says Edda Gschwendtner, CERN AWAKE project leader. “We have installed the 16 magnets for the proton line for AWAKE, built the laser clean room, modified the access, cooling, and ventilation. It has been a huge amount of work in a very short time.”

Commissioning with the proton beam from the SPS an first tests of AWAKE are planned for 2016.

The SPSC reviews the AWAKE experiment and took the opportunity to visit the facility.