Canada’s contribution to AWAKE – a plasma wakefield experiment at CERN

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This proposal seeks funding for Canada to make an important contribution to the Advanced Wakefield Experiment (AWAKE), one of the leading global projects in the field of plasma wakefield acceleration (PWFA) research. In the past decade acceleration schemes by induced wakefield in plasmas have demonstrated gradients in excess of GV/m, more than 3 orders of magnitude higher than existing radio frequency technology, and hold promise of more compact and affordable future accelerators for particle physics, X-ray science, and medical applications. Unique among PWFA projects and first of its kind is the AWAKE experiment driven by 400 GeV proton beam from the CERN SPS synchrotron. The potential of single-stage energy transfer by proton, and its advantage over multi-stage electron driven alternatives, are compelling. In the meantime achieving synchronism with the plasma wave at a mm length scale by the long proton bunch is a challenge. A major focus of the experiment is thus to demonstrate a novel mechanism, proton bunch longitudinal self-modulation inside the plasma, critical to the success of this concept. First protons to the experiment are expected early in 2016.