CERN Accelerating science

The AWAKE project at CERN is planned to study proton driven plasma wakefield acceleration with an externally injected electron beam. Therefore two transfer lines are being designed in order to provide the proton beam from the SPS and the electron beam from an RF gun to the plasma cell. The commissioning of the proton line will take place in 2016 for the first phase of the experiment, which is focused on the self-modulation of a 12 cm long proton bunch in the plasma. The electron line will be added for the second phase of AWAKE in 2017, when the wakefield will be probed with an electron beam of 10–20 MeV/c. The challenge for these transfer lines lies in the parallel operation of the proton, electron and laser beam used to ionize the plasma and seed the self-modulation. These beams, of different characteristics, need to be synchronized and positioned for optimized injection conditions into the wakefield. This task requires great flexibility in the transfer line optics. The status of these designs will be presented in this paper.