ELENA project status

The Extra Low Energy Antiproton ring (ELENA) is a small ring at CERN which will be built to increase substantially the number of usable antiprotons delivered to the experiments for studies with antihydrogen and antiprotonic nuclei. The project is now at stage of finishing the technical design. This presentation reviews the major features of ELENA: the ring, transfer lines and experimental area layout, the choice of the basic machine parameters and the main challenges. Electron cooling plays a key role in ELENA both for efficient deceleration as well as for preparing extracted beam with parameters defined by the experiments. The choice of machine optics as a tool for achieving the required parameters and fitting the available space is discussed. The important systems like the magnets, vacuum, beam instrumentations and others are reviewed as well.