Accelerators Validating Antimatter Physics

The Extra Low Energy Antiproton ring (ELENA) will be a critical upgrade to the unique Antiproton Decelerator facility at CERN and is currently being commissioned. ELENA will significantly enhance the achievable 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 fully characterize the beam's properties, as well as in novel experiments that exploit the enhanced beam quality that ELENA will provide. These three areas form the scientific work packages of the new pan-European research and training initiative AVA (Accelerators Validating Antimatter physics). The project has received around 4M€ of funding and brings together universities, research centers and industry to train 15 Fellows through research in this area. This contribution presents the research results across AVA's three scientific work packages.