AD performance and its extension towards ELENA

The CERN’s Antiproton Decelerator (AD) is devoted to special experiments with low energy antiprotons. A main topic is the antihydrogen production with the present aim to produce these antimatter atoms with such low energy that they can be trapped in a magnetic gradient field. First very convincing results have been published recently by ALPHA. Still, it appears to be cumbersome, time consuming and ineffective when collecting the needed large numbers and high densities of antiproton clouds with the present AD. Both the effectiveness and the availability for additional experiments at this unique facility would drastically increase, if the antiproton beam of presently 5 MeV kinetic energy would be reduced by an additional decelerator to something like 100 keV. Such a facility ”ELENA”, as an abbreviation for Extra Low ENergy Antiproton Ring and first discussed in 1982 for LEAR, was freshly proposed with a substantial new design and revised layout and is presently under consideration. ELENA will increase the number of useful antiprotons by up to two orders of magnitude and will allow to serve up to four experiments in parallel.