CERN Accelerating science

The proton driven plasma wake field acceleration experiment AWAKE at CERN will start at the end of this year. In 2017 an S-band electron injector producing bunches of a few ps in length will be added to probe the wake fields stimulated by a driving proton beam. In the future this electron injector will have to be upgraded to obtain electron bunches with a length of 100-200 fs in order to demonstrate injection into a single bucket of the plasma wave and therefore sustainable acceleration with low energy spread. Target bunch parameters for the study are a bunch charge of 100 pC, 100 fs bunch length, an emittance smaller than 10 mm mrad and a beam energy > 50 MeV. The status of a study to achieve these parameters using X-band accelerator hardware and velocity bunching will be presented.