Beam Transfer Line Design for a Plasma Wakefield Acceleration Experiment (AWAKE) at the CERN SPS

The world’s first proton driven plasma wakefield acceleration experiment (AWAKE) is presently being studied at CERN. The experimentwill use a high energy proton beam extracted from the SPS as driver. Two possible locations for installing the AWAKE facility were considered: the West Area and the CNGS beam line. The previous transfer line from the SPS to the West Area was completely dismantled in 2005 and would need to be fully re-designed and re-built. For this option, geometric constraints for radiation protection reasons would limit the maximum proton beam energy to 300 GeV. The existing CNGS line could be used by applying only minor changes to the lattice for the final focusing and the interface between the proton beam and the laser, required for plasma ionisation and bunch-modulation seeding. The beam line design studies performed for the two options are presented.