Physicists of the AWAKE project at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) basing on the theoretical model performed by Siberian scientists from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences achieved the first ever successful acceleration of electrons using a wave generated by protons zipping through a plasma.

Electrons were accelerated by a factor of around 100 over a length of 10 metres. Electrons injected into AWAKE at the energy of around 19 MeV were accelerated to an energy of almost 2 GeV.

A new technique of acceleration of electrons, so-called wakefield acceleration, could drastically reduce the sizes, and therefore the costs, of the accelerators needed to achieve the high-energy collisions and increase their capacity.

More details:

Press release by CERN, 30 August 2018

Article by RIA Novosti

Article published on the N+1 web-site

AWAKE’s electron beam line © CERN