On 17 March 2023, the AWAKE UK collaboration held its bi-annual meeting at Novotel Liverpool Paddington Village to discuss the status of the project and progress made across the various work packages and tasks.
The Advanced Proton Driven Plasma Wakefield Acceleration Experiment (AWAKE) is an accelerator R&D project based at CERN and carried out by an international collaboration. It is a proof-of-principle experiment investigating the use of plasma wakefields driven by a proton bunch to accelerate charged particles. The UK has been a key partner in the experiment from the start with activities covering the planning and optimization of the experiment, R&D into beyond state-of-the-art diagnostics for the different laser and particle beams, as well as studies into enhanced electron beam generation.
Photograph of the in-person participants of the AWAKE-UK collaboration meeting
(photo courtesy Alexandra Welsch).
Professor Carsten P Welsch, scientific project manager of AWAKE-UK, said: “The meeting was an excellent opportunity to discuss our experimental results to date and agree plans for the upcoming runs 2b – 2d. The AWAKE experiment has already demonstrated several world’s-first results and our research helps understand the physics of the high gradient acceleration process better.”
Talks covered results from studies into Cherenkov diffraction radiation-based monitors, a novel discharge plasma source, and plasma afterglow metrology, amongst others. Plans for future improvement of the experiment were discussed in detail in will be presented to the wider collaboration in a retreat at CERN later this month. Special thanks go to Project T.E.A.M. members Dr Ricardo Torres and Alexandra Welsch for their help in organizing this event.