Electron Witness Constraints for AWAKE

The AWAKE project at CERN successfully demonstrated the use of a proton driver to accelerate an electron witness in plasma*. One of the key goals for AWAKE Run2 is to better control this acceleration, separating the proton-beam-modulation and electron-acceleration stages in order to achieve high energy electrons with high beam quality. Controlled acceleration additionally requires careful tuning of the witness bunch parameters at the injection point. In this work, we use particle-in-cell simulations to study the tolerances for this matching, and discuss techniques to loosen these constraints.