Accelerators Validating Antimatter Physics (AVA)

Antimatter experiments are at the cutting edge of science. They are, however, very difficult to realize and have been limited by the performance of the only existing facility in the world, the Antiproton Decelerator (AD) at CERN. The Extra Low Energy Antiproton ring (ELENA) will be a critical upgrade to this unique facility and commissioned from autumn 2016. This will significantly enhance the beam quality and enable new experiments. To fully exploit the discovery potential of this facility, advances are urgently required in numerical tools that can adequately model beam transport, life time and interaction, beam diagnostics tools and detectors to characterize the beam's properties, as well as in novel experiments that exploit the enhanced beam quality that ELENA will provide. AVA is a new European research and training initiative between universities, research centers and industry that will carry out R&D into ELENA and related facilities. This contribution gives an overview of the AVA research programme across its three scientific work packages.