Starting Up the AWAKE Experiment at CERN

AWAKE, the Advanced Proton Driven Plasma Wake-field Acceleration Experiment at CERN was approved in 2013. The facility was commissioned in 2016 to perform first experiments to demonstrate the self-modulation in-stability (SMI) of a 400 GeV/c SPS proton bunch in a 10 m long Rubidium plasma cell. The plasma is created in Rb vapor via field ionization by a TW laser pulse. In the second phase starting late 2017, the proton driven plasma wakefield will be probed with an externally injected 10 ' 20 MeV/c electron beam. This paper gives an overview of the AWAKE facility, describes the successful commissioning of the laser and proton beam line, the plasma cell and diagnostics and shows the successful synchronization of the proton beam with the laser at the few ps level so that the facility is ready for the SMI physics runs. In addition the status of the electron acceleration exper-iment for late 2017 will be presented.