Physics to plan AWAKE Run 2

TL;DR

The paper outlines the physics principles guiding the planning of AWAKE Run 2, focusing on electron acceleration with low energy spread and emittance, based on prior experiments and simulations.

Contribution

It introduces the physics considerations and experimental design for achieving high-quality electron acceleration in AWAKE Run 2.

Findings

Design principles for plasma-based electron acceleration.

Use of two plasmas and electron bunch seeding.

Goals to achieve low energy spread and emittance.

Abstract

We briefly describe the basic physics principles considered for planning of the AWAKE Run 2 experiment. These principles are based on experimental results obtained during Run 1 and knowledge obtained from numerical simulation results and other experiments. The goal of Run 2 is to accelerate an electron bunch with a narrow relative energy spread and an emittance sufficiently low for applications. The experiment will use two plasmas, electron bunch seeding for the SM process, on-axis external injection of an electron bunch and electron bunch parameters to reach plasma blow-out, beam loading and beam matching.