The AWAKE project

It was a great pleasure for me to get to know Chattopadhyay and I appreciated very much to be invited to participate in the Symposium organized in his honor. My connection to Swapan came via the AWAKE experiment, a novel approach to plasma wakefield acceleration. Swapan was both a great source of inspiration and help in getting the project started, and a great discussion partner. He was particularly influential in energizing the UK community to participate in AWAKE. It is largely due to him that UK groups are major contributors to the AWAKE program, and for that I am deeply thankful. The AWAKE project offers new possibilities for accelerator-based particle physics. I briefly describe the concept behind AWAKE and first experimental results.