Canada's contribution to AWAKE - a proton-driven plasma wakefield experiment at CERN

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Proposal for continuing TRIUMF participation in the AWAKE collaboration, 2018-2021 For the last three years TRIUMF has been an active member of the AWAKE collaboration. a) Operation and service TRIUMF has manufactured, delivered and installed all the equipment it committed to contribute for the AWAKE experiment. Part of the hardware, such as BPM electronics, is a complex, state-of-the-art piece of instrumentation. The AWAKE collaboration expects the TRIUMF group to provide continuous support of the equipment that it has built. This task will require regular travels to CERN to participate in experiment runs, to troubleshoot, and to repair the hardware in case of failures. A few spare parts have also to be procured and built. b) System Upgrade The overall success of the AWAKE experiment depends on the ability to precisely control proton, electron and laser beams in time and space. In particular, the electron beam is expected to transversely overlap with the proton bunch and stay longitudinally behind the laser pulse by a defined amount of time. This task is impossible to perform without proper beam instrumentation. In principle, one can separately measure the position of the proton and electron bunches, since electrons' repetition rate is 10 Hz, while the proton beam is expected only about every 30 seconds. Thus, the electron position can be measured when protons are not available. The valid concern here is that the Coulomb field of the proton bunch will deflect the electrons as they tend to approach and then the electron beam position measured in the absence of the proton bunch will be different from the practically important case when both beams co-propagate together. For this reason it was requested that the two last TRIUMF beam position monitors measure the electron beam position in the presence of proton bunches. c) New diagnostics development for Run 2 Compared to the Run 1 the bunch length is reduced by a factor of 20-30 and to keep the emittance low the bunch charge is correspondingly reduced three times. With such a lower bunch charge the beam position monitor electronics TRIUMF developed for Run 1 will not meet the resolution requirement of 50 micrometers shot-to-shot. Thus, TRIUMF is asked to modify the existing electronics to increase the signal-to-noise ratio. Budget: To support two to three students to work on various aspects of AWAKE beam diagnostics development ($36k for 2 years). To develop and build diagnostics hardware, upgrade the associated electronics and the acquisition system ($117k). Travel funds to participate in experimental runs, operate and service the hardware and travel for collaboration meetings ($24k). Total request: $177k over 3 years. Timely funding of the current proposal will secure a firm presence of TRIUMF, and Canadian Science at large, in this vital area of research for fundamental and applied physics of tomorrow.