Commissioning and performance of a phase-compensated optical link for the AWAKE experiment at CERN

In this work, we analyze the performance of the solution adopted for the compensation of the phase drift of a 3 km optical fiber link used for the AWAKE experiment at CERN. The link is devoted to transmit the reference signals used to synchronize the SPS beam with the experiment to have a fixed phase relation, regardless of the external conditions of the electronics and the link itself. The system has been operating for more than a year without observed drift in the beam phases. Specific measurements have proven that the jitter introduced by the system is lower than 0.6 ps and the maximum phase drift of the link is at the picosecond level.