Particle physics experiments based on the AWAKE acceleration scheme

Abstract

New particle acceleration schemes open up exciting opportunities, potentially providing more compact or higher-energy accelerators. The AWAKE experiment at CERN is currently taking data to establish the method of proton-driven plasma wakefield acceleration. A second phase aims to demonstrate that bunches of about $10^9$ electrons can be accelerated to high energy, preserving emittance and that the process is scalable with length. With this, an electron beam of $O$(50 GeV) could be available for new fixed-target or beam-dump experiments searching for the hidden sector, like dark photons. The rate of electrons on target could be increased by a factor of more than 1000 compared to currently available, leading to a corresponding increase in sensitivity to new physics. Such a beam could also be brought into collision with a high-power laser and thereby probe the completely unmeasured region of strong fields at values of the Schwinger critical field. An ultimate goal is to produce an electron beam of $O$(3 TeV) and collide with an LHC proton beam. This very high energy electron-proton collider would probe a new regime in which the structure of matter is completely unknown.

10 pages, 4 figures. Presented at Royal Society meeting, "Directions in particle beam-driven plasma wakefield acceleration"

References in corpus (12)

• Observation of a new particle in the search for the Standard Model Higgs boson with the ATLAS detector at the LHC
• Observation of a new boson at a mass of 125 GeV with the CMS experiment at the LHC
• Acceleration of electrons in the plasma wakefield of a proton bunch
• US Cosmic Visions: New Ideas in Dark Matter 2017: Community Report
• Search for invisible decays of sub-GeV dark photons in missing-energy events at the CERN SPS
• Experimental observation of proton bunch modulation in a plasma, at varying plasma densities
• Experimental observation of plasma wakefield growth driven by the seeded self-modulation of a proton bunch
• AWAKE readiness for the study of the seeded self-modulation of a 400\,GeV proton bunch
• Strong field QED in lepton colliders and electron/laser interactions
• The proton spin puzzle: where are we today ?
• Collider design issues based on proton-driven plasma wakefield acceleration
• Proton Driven Plasma Wakefield Acceleration in AWAKE

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Particle physics applications of the AWAKE acceleration scheme
• Compton recoil effects in staging of laser wakefield accelerators
• Kinematic fitting of Neutral current events in deep inelastic ep collisions