We are very pleased to announce that the Julius Wess Award 2026 will be given to Prof. Dr. Allen Caldwell (Max-Planck-Institut für Physik) in recognition of the invention, development, and proof-of-principle demonstration of a proton-driven plasma wakefield accelerator for electrons.

The award, endowed with 10,000 euros, was once again sponsored by the Erika and Dr. Wolfgang Eichelberger Foundation, a trust foundation under the umbrella of the KIT Foundation.

You will soon find information about the presentation of the award here.

 Prof. Caldwell was born in Verdun/France, in 1959 and has dual citizenship of the USA and France. He studied physics at Rice University in Texas, then moved to the University of Wisconsin, where he earned his doctorate. He then spent 15 years at Columbia University, where he eventually became a full professor. In 1997, he became head of the ZEUS experiment at the HERA accelerator at DESY in Hamburg. In 1999, he was appointed director of the Nevis Laboratory at Columbia University in New York; since 2002, he has served as a director at the Max Planck Institute for Physics (now located in Garching, near Munich)

Prof. Caldwell teaches data analysis techniques and Monte Carlo methods at the Technical University of Munich, where he holds an honorary professorship. Prof. Caldwell was AWAKE spokesperson from its inception in 2013 until 2023.

The idea of using a proton beam as a driver for plasma wakefield acceleration apparently came to Prof. Caldwell while reviewing the now more conventional plasma wakefield acceleration

using electrons as a driver. In a short amount of time, Prof. Caldwell had assembled a small team to study the idea using theoretical calculations and Monte Carlo simulations, culminating in the seminal publication "Proton-driven plasma-wakefield acceleration" in Nature Physics in 2009.

After showing the principle on paper, an experimental collaboration was formed to test the idea in practice: the Advanced WAKEfield Experiment (AWAKE) at CERN. AWAKE was approved as an experiment at the SPS at CERN in 2013. In 2018, the first results for the “acceleration of electrons in the plasma wakefield of a proton bunch” were published in Nature by the AWAKE collaboration. Electrons were accelerated from less than 20 MeV to 2.0 GeV in a 10 m Rb plasma cell in the wakefield of a proton bunch.

The necessary self-modulation of the long SPS proton bunches in micro-bunches that match the plasma wavelength was also demonstrated.

The AWAKE collaboration continues to actively research, understand, and improve protondriven plasma wakefield acceleration of electrons. The availability of powerful and highly energetic proton beams at CERN, at the SPS and LHC, holds promise for producing electrons at much higher energies than achieved so far in accelerators, with a relatively modest investment.