awake

The AWAKE (Advanced WAKEfield Experiment) facility at CERN is a proof-of-principle experiment, which investigates wakefield plasma acceleration using a proton bunch as a driver, a world-wide first. It aims to accelerate a low-energy witness bunch of electrons from 15 to 20 MeV to several GeV over a short distance (10 m) by creating a high acceleration gradient of several GV/m. Particle accelerators currently in use, like CERN's LHC, use standard or superconductive RF-cavities for acceleration, but they are limited to an acceleration gradient in the order of 100 MV/m.
Circular accelerator machines are not efficient for transporting electrons at high energy due to the large energy loss in synchrotron radiation. Linear accelerators do not have this issue and are therefore better suited for accelerating and transporting electrons at high energies.
AWAKE's high acceleration gradient will allow the construction of a new generation of shorter and less expensive high energy accelerators, representing a big step in the particle accelerators technology, especially for linear electron accelerators.

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