Extreme Light Infrastructure
The Extreme Light Infrastructure is a Research Infrastructure of pan-European interest and part of the European ESFRI Roadmap. ELI hosts the most intense beamline system worldwide, develop new interdisciplinary research opportunities with light from these lasers and secondary radiation derived from them, and make them available to the international scientific user community. ELI aims to be the world's biggest and first international user facility in beamline and laser research.
The facility will be based on four sites. Three of them are presently being implemented in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania, with an investment volume exceeding €850 million, mostly stemming from the European Regional Development Fund. In Dolní Břežany, near Prague, Czech Republic, the ELI Beamlines facility is developing short-pulse secondary sources of radiation and particles. The ELI Attosecond Light Pulse Source in Szeged, Hungary is establishing a unique facility which provides light sources within an extremely broad frequency range in the form of ultrashort pulses with high repetition rate. In Măgurele, Romania, the ELI Nuclear Physics facility is focusing on laser-based nuclear physics. The location of ELI's fourth pillar, the highest-intensity pillar, is still to be decided. Its laser power is expected to exceed that of the current ELI pillars by about one order of magnitude.
History
The Extreme Light Infrastructure project started as a bottom-up initiative by the European scientific laser community and the network of large national laser facilities, LASERLAB-EUROPE, in the context of the preparation of the first European ESFRI Roadmap in 2005. From 2007 to 2010 ELI entered into a European-Commission-funded preparatory phase, comprising 40 laboratories from 13 countries. Gérard Mourou, the initiator of the ELI project, was the coordinator of the preparatory phase.At the meeting of the Steering Committee on October 1, 2009 in Prague, the ELI Preparatory Phase Consortium officially gave the mandate to the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania to proceed towards the construction of ELI. On December 10, 2010, at the end of the preparatory phase, the project was fully handed over to the ELI Delivery Consortium, consisting of representatives from the three host countries. ERDF funding of the ELI-Beamlines facility in the Czech Republic was granted by the European Commission on April 20, 2011, followed by ELI-Nuclear Physics in Romania on September 18, 2012. Funding for the ELI-ALPS facility in Hungary was granted in early 2014.
The ELI Delivery Consortium International Association was founded on April 11, 2013 as an international non-profit association under Belgian law. It promotes the sustainable development of ELI as a pan-European research infrastructure, supports the coordinated implementation of the ELI research facilities, and preserves the consistency and complementarity of their scientific missions. It also organises the establishment of an international consortium that will be in charge of the future operation of ELI, preferably in the form of a European Research Infrastructure Consortium. The ELI-DC International Association is open to membership by institutions from all interested countries.
ELI research centres
ELI Beamlines
The main goal at ELI Beamlines is to create the most advanced laser equipment in the world. This will be accomplished and implemented through research projects covering the interaction of light with matter at intensities that are 10 times higher than the values that are currently achievable. With ultra-short laser pulses that last only some femtoseconds and performances of up to 10 PW ELI will bring new techniques and tools for basic research as well as for areas such as medical imaging and diagnostics, radiotherapy, new materials, and X-ray optics.ELI Beamlines Laser Center is a unique top-class device built for Czech and international scientific research – for users who carry out basic and applied research experiments using four ultra-intensive laser systems, which are gradually put into full operation.
ELI Beamlines is designed as a high-energy and high-repetitive pillar of the European ELI project. The main objective of the project is, in accordance with the ELI White Paper , to create a high-energy beam device that can develop and utilize ultra-short pulses of high energy particles and radiation stemming from relativistic and ultrarelativistic interactions. The ELI Beamlines Center strives to address one of the “major challenges”, namely generating ultrashort pulses of energy particle beams and radiation generated by compact laser plasma accelerators. They are expected to support the ultra-high science science, ie to achieve an ultra-relativistic regime.
More at: www.eli-beams.eu
Building opened in 2015
User experiments started in 2018
ELI Beamlines laser systems
L1 ALLEGRA - TW laser, 100 millijoule, 1 kHz - in operation
L2 AMOS - 100 TW laser, 2 Joule, 50 Hz
L3 HAPLS - 1 PW laser, 30 Joule, 10 Hz - in operation
L4 ATON - 10 PW laser, 2 KJoule - in operation
ELI-ALPS
Located in Szeged, South-east of Hungary the main objective of ELI-ALPS, the attosecond pillar of the Extreme Light Infrastructure, in accordance with the ELI White Paper is 1) to generate X-UV and X-ray femtosecond and attosecond pulses, for temporal investigation at the attosecond scale of electron dynamics in atoms, molecules, plasmas and solids; 2) source developments.The ELI-ALPS lasers have matchless parameters that enable the generation of unique attosecond pulses and pulsetrain in the VUV and X-ray spectral regions that are not available elsewhere.
ELI-ALPS Laser Technology
ELI-ALPS offers more than just the use of a novel class of state-of-the-art laser systems. The unique combination of the outstanding laser pulses with the pioneering secondary sources technologies will open up new opportunities in experimental research. This places ELI-ALPS as one of the leading lights in ultrafast physical processes as well as a world-class centre for generating outstanding biological, chemical, medical and materials science results.
Key characteristics include:
- The peak power and repetition rate of few cycle phase stabilized laser systems are ranging from fraction of TW to multi-PW, and 100 kHz to 10 Hz, respectively.
- High-energy extreme ultraviolet photons will be generated via high-harmonic processes in gases and on solids, leading to single pulses with a pulse duration as short as tens of attoseconds.
- X-rays will originate from a dedicated relativistic laser-electron Thomson scattering source.
- THz pulses with even mJ energy are generated via optical rectification in nonlinear crystals.
Building opened in 2017
User experiments started in 2018
ELI-ALPS laser systems
| Laser Source | Central Wavelength | Pulse Energy | Pulse Duration | Repetition Rate | Peak Power | Average Power |
| HR 1 | 1030 nm | 1 mJ | 7 fs | 100 kHz | 200 GW | 100 W |
| HR 2 | 1030 nm | 5 mJ | 6.7 fs | 100 kHz | 1 TW | 500 W |
| SYLOS 2 | 900 nm | 35 mJ | 7 fs | 1 kHz | 5 TW | 35 W |
| SYLOS ALIGNMENT | 850 nm | 40 mJ | 12 fs | 10 Hz | 3 TW | 0.4 W |
| HF PW | 800 nm | 34 J | 17 fs | 10 Hz | 2 PW | 340 W |
| MIR | 2.8-4 μm | 150 μJ | 40 fs | 100 kHz | 3 GW | 15 W |
| THz pump | 1 μm | 500 mJ | 500 fs | 50 Hz | 1 TW | 25 W |
ELI NP
The ELI NP Research Centre is an under construction facility in Măgurele, Romania, that will host the world's most powerful laser. The laser technology might be used to destroy nuclear waste and provide a new type of cancer radiotherapy called hadrontherapy. The largest scientific project in Romania, ELI-NP will be the only European and international centre for high-level research on ultra-high intensity laser, laser-matter interaction and secondary sources with unparalleled possibilities. ELI-NP is a very complex facility which will host two machines of extreme performances:- a very high intensity laser, where beams from two 10 PW lasers are coherently added to get intensities of the order of 1023–1024 W/cm2 and electrical fields of 1015 V/m over an area of a few square micrometers.
- a very intense, brilliant γ beam, 0.1% bandwidth, with Ev > 19 MeV, which is obtained by incoherent Compton back scattering of a laser light off a very brilliant, intense, classical electron beam produced by a warm linac.
The inauguration of works to the infrastructure of this project took place on 14 June 2013. The laser was made in France and tested in Paris and will be brought to Romania.
On March 13, 2019, Măgurele held the public communication of the ELI-NP high-power laser system test results, which was also a demonstration test, confirming the achievement of the power of 10 PW. Achieving the 10 PW at the ELI-NP laser is a milestone for world-class research, Europe owning for the first time through Romania, the world's most powerful laser. The ELI-NP laser thus becomes the most powerful laser system ever made.