Home > Press > ELI gears up for laser beam infrastructure launch
Abstract:
Can an intense laser rip photons into electron-positron pairs? Seeking to shed light on this burning question is the ELI ('Extreme light infrastructure') project, which received EUR 6 million in funding under the 'Infrastructures' Theme of the EU's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). The project partners have set their sights on making ELI the first infrastructure to approach this limit - over six orders of magnitude higher than today's laser intensity.
From now until 2010, the 15 partners from 13 EU Member States will develop the infrastructure for the generation of laser beams with intensities that are over 1,000 times higher than the values being obtained today.
The chairman of Romania's National Authority for Scientific Research (ANCS) has announced that Romania will be a host country for the infrastructure. Marius Enachescu told reporters that Romania will play a central role in the construction of a European infrastructure, a complex of high-power lasers and particle accelerators, southeast of the capital of Bucharest.
'This project will place Romania on the map of European facilities,' Dr Enachescu remarked. 'Researchers from around the world will come to Romania, which will have important positive consequences on the country's image and its industry.'
As a partner, the Institute of Physics at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic is responsible for generating high-intensity laser beams, and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences is tackling attosecond physics.
Dr Enachescu pointed out that the lasers' power will be on the scale of petawatts (1 quadrillion watts) and hexawatts. Production of such a laser device would be 'a second laser revolution in medicine, after a first one that marked the use of laser in surgery', he said.
According to the researchers, their infrastructure will be able to offer power in the blink of an eye. Basically, the times will be measured in attoseconds (1 attosecond equals a billionth of a billionth of a second), resulting in power that is equivalent to more than 10,000 times the power produced by all laser beam generators found on earth.
Dr Enachescu pointed out that this new and improved infrastructure will enable exploration of areas that are currently inaccessible, such as laser-matter interaction at the highest intensity level where relativistic laws may no longer suffice, and will allow research into the dynamics of electrons within atoms, molecules, plasmas and solids, up to creating particle-antiparticle pairs in vacuum.
ELI is focusing on becoming a multidisciplinary platform with specialised laser, particle or radiation beam lines for a number of scientific fields including nuclear, atomic, particle, cosmology and gravitational, as well as for social sciences.
Environment, life sciences, material science and nanotechnology will also profit from the results of the project. ELI also will be instrumental in promoting the transfer of technology, education and training.
The results of this project will also fuel the development of small-size particle accelerators of parameters that resemble big accelerators that are currently available. Also, the applications can be used in anti-cancer therapies, as well as for decreasing the life cycle of radioactive waste from millions of years to some tens of minutes.
Other ELI members include Sofia University (Bulgaria), the Prague Asterix Laser System (Czech Republic), SOLEIL (France), the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (Germany), the Technical University of Crete (Greece), the University of Pécs (Hungary), the Laser Research Center (Lithuania) and the MUT (Military University of Technology) Institute of Optoelectronics (Poland).
For more information, please visit: ELI: www.extreme-ligh-infrastructure.eu
####
About CORDIS
CORDIS, the Community Research and Development Information Service, is a free service provided by the Office for Official Publications of the European Communities.
It is dedicated to promoting participation in the EU research programmes and to facilitating the uptake of European research results by industry. The service contributes to achieve the strategic goal of the European Union to become the most competitive knowledge based economy in the world by 2010.
For more information, please click here
Copyright © CORDIS
If you have a comment, please Contact us.Issuers of news releases, not 7th Wave, Inc. or Nanotechnology Now, are solely responsible for the accuracy of the content.
Related News Press |
News and information
Simulating magnetization in a Heisenberg quantum spin chain April 5th, 2024
NRL charters Navy’s quantum inertial navigation path to reduce drift April 5th, 2024
Discovery points path to flash-like memory for storing qubits: Rice find could hasten development of nonvolatile quantum memory April 5th, 2024
Govt.-Legislation/Regulation/Funding/Policy
NRL charters Navy’s quantum inertial navigation path to reduce drift April 5th, 2024
Discovery points path to flash-like memory for storing qubits: Rice find could hasten development of nonvolatile quantum memory April 5th, 2024
Chemical reactions can scramble quantum information as well as black holes April 5th, 2024
Announcements
NRL charters Navy’s quantum inertial navigation path to reduce drift April 5th, 2024
Discovery points path to flash-like memory for storing qubits: Rice find could hasten development of nonvolatile quantum memory April 5th, 2024
Photonics/Optics/Lasers
With VECSELs towards the quantum internet Fraunhofer: IAF achieves record output power with VECSEL for quantum frequency converters April 5th, 2024
Nanoscale CL thermometry with lanthanide-doped heavy-metal oxide in TEM March 8th, 2024
Optically trapped quantum droplets of light can bind together to form macroscopic complexes March 8th, 2024
HKUST researchers develop new integration technique for efficient coupling of III-V and silicon February 16th, 2024
Alliances/Trade associations/Partnerships/Distributorships
Chicago Quantum Exchange welcomes six new partners highlighting quantum technology solutions, from Chicago and beyond September 23rd, 2022
University of Illinois Chicago joins Brookhaven Lab's Quantum Center June 10th, 2022
The latest news from around the world, FREE | ||
Premium Products | ||
Only the news you want to read!
Learn More |
||
Full-service, expert consulting
Learn More |
||