  The Advanced Wakefield Experiment (AWAKE) is an accelerator R&D experiment at
CERN using, for the first time, a high-energy proton bunch to drive wakefields
in plasma and accelerating electrons to the GeV energy scale. The principle of
the AWAKE experiment is described. We show experimental results of the seeded
self-modulation process of the long 400 GeV SPS proton bunch, transforming the
bunch into a train of micro-bunches and driving resonantly the wakefields in
the 10 m long Rb plasma. We also show that externally-injected electrons can be
accelerated by these wakefields to several GeV. The next steps of the AWAKE
experimental program are shown. Possible first applications to high-energy
physics experiments, where the scheme takes advantage of the large energy
stored in the proton bunch to reach very high energy gain in a single plasma,
are described.
