The Extreme Light Infrastructure—Attosecond Light Pulse Source (ELI-ALPS) Project

Abstract

Globally, large international research infrastructures have over many decades promoted excellence in science and technology. Aligned with the international practice, the Europe Strategy Forum for Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) has developed and keeps updating a roadmap for research infrastructures. The Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) is one of the two large scale Laser Research Infrastructures (RI) proposed in the ESFRI Roadmap published in 2006. ELI aims to provide access to some of the most intense world-wide lasers for the international scientific user community, as well as secondary radiation and particle sources driven by them, offering to the users new interdisciplinary research opportunities. ELI is currently implemented as a distributed infrastructure in three pillars: ELI-Beamlines (ELI-BL) in Dolni Břežany, Czech Republic, ELI-Attosecond Light Pulse Source (ELI-ALPS) in Szeged, Hungary and ELI-Nuclear Physics (ELI-NP) in Magurele, Romania. This chapter is devoted to introduce the Hungarian pillar, ELI-ALPS, which will be operational in Szeged in 2018, with the primary mission to provide to the users the highest laboratory spatiotemporal resolution and a secondary mission to contribute to the technological development towards 200 petawatt (PW) lasers for high-field science, which is the ultimate goal of the ELI project. The chapter includes descriptions of the primary and secondary sources, while emphasis is given to selected examples of the scientific case of ELI-ALPS, presenting unique access offered by the technologies to be hosted in the infrastructure.