AWAKE-UK Collaboration met in Liverpool

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.

In-person participants of the AWAKE-UK collaboration meeting.

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 Cockcroft Institute has been a key partner in the experiment from the start, with partners from the Universities of Lancaster, Liverpool, Manchester and Strathclyde 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.

CI expert Guoxing Xia, from the University of Manchester, presented a talk on ‘Betatron radiation in AWAKE Run 2’.

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.