Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) Beamlines in the Czech Republic

The European Commission approved unique project of the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) Beamlines in Dolni Brezany. This is the first of the large projects of the Operational Programme Research and Development for Innovation (OP RDI). The center built for a budget of almost 7 billion Czech crowns should become operational at the beginning of the year 2016.

Implementation of ELI will consist in building three laser facilities that will be consolidated under the ELI project. The prime objective is to build a unified infrastructure based on these three mutually supporting pillars. The Beamline Facility, planned to be built in the Czech Republic, will be the first of the three facilities; its focus will be developing a brand new generation of secondary sources for interdisciplinary applications in physics, medicine, biology, and material sciences. The Attosecond Facility, scheduled for location in Hungary, will be the second project, and will study physics of ultrashort optical pulses on attosecond scale. The third, Photonuclear Facility, will be built in Romania and will focus on photonuclear physics.

Implementation of ELI in the Czech Republic is coordinated by the Institute of Physics of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. The Institute of Physics is a member of the ELI-PP Consortium, and acts as a representative of the Czech Republic; it also coordinates the national ELI-CZ Consortium, whose members include 14 large Czech universities and research institutions.

Web page of the project.