Witness Beam Production with an RF Gun and a Travelling Wave Booster Linac for AWAKE Experiment at CERN

AWAKE is a unique experiment that aims to demonstrate the proton driven plasma wakefield acceleration. In this experiment, proton bunches from the SPS accelerator will be injected into a 10m long pre-formed plasma section to form wakefields of hundreds MV/m to several GV/m. A second beam, e.g., the witness beam, will be injected after the protons in an appropriate phase to gain energy from the wakefields. A photo-injector will be utilised to deliver this second beam. It consists of an S-band RF gun followed by a meter long accelerating travelling wave structure (ATS). The RF gun was recuperated from existing PHIN photo-injector. A 3D RF design of the ATS was done by using the CST code and the field maps produced were used to characterise the electron beam dynamics under space charge effect by using the PARMELA code. The impact of the mechanical errors on the beam dynamics were investigated.