Construction on ELI-NP infrastructure to be started on Friday

[Fi8sVrs]

Romania's Government, Education Ministry and the Horia Hulubei National Institute of Nuclear Physics and Engineering (IFIN-HH) will hold on Friday at the Magurele research platform a ceremony for the start of construction works on the Extreme Light Infrastructure - Nuclear Physics (ELI-NP) research facility.

Attending the event will be Romania's Prime Minister Victor Ponta; European Commissioner for Regional Policy Johannes Hahn; Romania's Education Ministry Remus Pricopie; Minister-delegate for Higher Education, Scientific Research and Development Mihnea Costoiu; state secretary with Education Ministry Tudor Prisecaru, and IFIN-HH Director General Nicolae Victor Zamfir.

The Extreme Light Infrastructure - Nuclear Physics (ELI-NP) Scientific Facility, to be built on the Magurele-Bucharest Physics Platform, will become operational in 2017 and employ the largest number of Eastern European nuclear specialists.

The main instruments of the centre will be a very high intensity laser, where beams from two 10 PW Apollon type lasers are coherently added to get intensities of the order of 1023 - 1024 W/cm2 and electrical fields of 1015 V/m, and a very intense (1013 y/s), brilliant 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 (Ee = 600 MeV). The brilliant bunched electron beam will be produced by a warm linac using the X-band technology.

ELI-NP will be one of the three pillars of ELI - THE EXTREME LIGHT INFRASTRUCTURE, along with the facilities dedicated to the study of secondary sources (Dolni Brezany, near Prague) and attosecond pulses (Szeged). ELI-NP is a very complex facility.

The project costs are put at 356.231 million euros, 83 percent of which will be covered by the EU and 17 percent by Romania.

The project will be developed in two stages: a stage that spans the current programming period of structural funds, when 180 million euros will be spent, to end in 2015, and a second stage, spanning the years 2014-2016.

Via