Researchers achieve first ever acceleration of electrons in a proton-driven plasma wave

Early in the morning on Saturday, 26 May 2018, the AWAKE collaboration at CERN successfully accelerated electrons for the first time using a wakefield generated by protons zipping through a plasma. A paper describing this important result was published in the journal Nature today. The electrons were accelerated by a factor of around 100 over a length of 10 metres: they were externally injected into AWAKE at an energy of around 19 MeV (million electronvolts) and attained an energy of almost 2 GeV...