S-band booster design and emittance preservation for the Awake $e^-$ injector

AWAKE is a proton driven plasma wakefield acceleration experiment at CERN which uses the protons from the SPS. It aims to study the self modulation instability of a proton bunch and the acceleration of an externally injected electron beam in the plasma wakefields, during the so called Phase II until the technical stop of LHC and its injector chain (LS2) in 2019. The external electron beam of 0.1 to 1nC charge per bunch will be generated using an S-band photo injector with a high QE semiconducting cathode. A booster linac was designed to allow variable electron energy for the plasma experiments from 16 to 20 MeV. For an RF gun and booster system, emittance control can be highlighted as a challenging transmission task. Once the beam emittance is compensated at the gun exit and the beam is delivered to the booster with an optimum beam envelope, fringing fields and imperfections in the linac become critical for preserving the injection emittance. This paper summarises the rf design studies in order to preserve the initial beam emittance at the entrance of the linac and alternative mitigation schemes in case of emittance growth.