EuPRAXIA Seminar: Proton-driven plasma-wakefield acceleration for collider applications

The next seminar in the series will take place on Friday 31st July at 11am UK time.  John Patrick Farmer, Deputy simulation coordinator for the AWAKE collaboration, based at Max-Planck-Institute, will present his seminar ‘Proton-driven plasma-wakefield acceleration for collider applications'.

John Patrick Farmer

About the talk

Plasma-wakefield acceleration offers high field gradients, typically on the order of 10 to 100 times larger than conventional RF cavities.  Ultimately, the maximum energy gain in a single stage is limited by the energy of the driver.  The large stored energy in currently available proton bunches therefore offers a unique pathway to accelerate a witness bunch of electrons to the energy frontier [1]. 

The AWAKE project makes use of currently available proton bunches from the CERN SPS.  These bunches are too long to effectively drive large plasma wakefields, and so acceleration is achieved by exploiting plasma instabilities to correctly condition the proton driver [2]. First applications for the resulting high-energy electron bunches would include strong-field QED experiments or dark-photon searches.  Collider applications require a higher average current, which introduces additional challenges.  In this talk we discuss three potential use cases of proton-driven wakefield acceleration for collider applications, corresponding to different levels of technical and physical challenge. 

A full-energy electron injector for the forthcoming Electron-Ion Collider could be achieved with minor upgrades of the currently existing RHIC blue ring, and would build on the successes of AWAKE [3].  A booster for the proposed LEP3 to bring centre-of-mass energy to the  t-tbar threshold would significantly increase the physics reach of the collider, and could be achieved using short proton drive bunches [4], which would require a significant upgrade of the CERN proton accelerator complex [5]. Finally, we discuss the application of proton-driven wakefield acceleration to a 10 TeV centre-of-mass collider, which introduces a range of hurdles for the proton acceleration complex. 

Despite the challenges, the unique advantages of proton-driven wakefield acceleration and the range of potential applications make this an exciting area of research, and an excellent theoretical framework in which to investigate some of the intrinsic limitations to reaching very high energies with plasma-wakefield acceleration. 

References 

[1] A. Caldwell et al., Nature Phys. 5, 363-367 (2009). 

[2] E. Gschwendtner et al. (AWAKE Collaboration), Symmetry 14, 1680 (2022). 

[3] J. P. Farmer et al., arXiv: 2605.07929 (2026). 

[4] J. P. Farmer, A. Caldwell and A. Pukhov, New J. Phys. 26, 113011 (2024). 

[5] F. Willeke, https://www.osti.gov/biblio/3028973 (2026). 

About the speaker

John did his PhD on simulation methods for laser-plasma interactions at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland. He moved to Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf for his postdoc, where he started working on beam-driven wakefield acceleration in plasma and joined the AWAKE project in 2015. In 2019, he moved to the Max-Planck Institute for Physics to lead the simulation effort for acceleration in AWAKE Run 2c. He is now the deputy simulation coordinator for the AWAKE collaboration, and also works on novel collider schemes based on plasma wakefield acceleration, including ALiVE.

You can sign up for the seminar series here. 

We hope to see you online on the 31st July!