ELI-NP

Romanian Government approves
financing of ELI-NP

Good afternoon! At the Government meeting of today, regarding the Ministry of Education, Research, Youth and Sports, along with the normative documents that were presented to you by Madam the Spokesperson, o note was approved concerning the building at Magurele, Ilfov County, of the Extreme Light Infrastructure-Nuclear Physics Facility, for research in the field of lasers and nuclear physics, in the frame of the European research infrastructure dedicated to the extreme light. Practically, this is a very important step in the construction of this laser infrastructure, the largest ever scientific project in Romania. Romania, may I remind you, has been designated to host one pillar of the most powerful laser ever built in the world. With the today decision of the Government, we can now go forward and submit the project evaluation to JASPERS, and then continue with approaching the European Commission for evaluation. The value of the project amounts to 280 million Euros that will come from European funds. This normative document is witness of the very strong Government commitment with respect to scientific research. I wish to remind you that since taking over my mandate, I have fulfilled several essential points in the governing program, as for instance joining CERN, the world largest research centre in high energy and particle physics and also what we did today for the construction of this research infrastructure. At the same time, the research budget sent by the Government to the Parliament takes into account a raise of 40% compared to 2009. The research budget was 1.1 Billion Lei in 2010. The Government has sent to the Parliament a proposal of 1.5 Billion Lei for the research budget. I would like to add, concerning the research budget that, at the same time with supplementing the research money, these funds will be awarded for scientific performances and not just on basis of friendly relations, friendly evaluation and for irrelevant scientific projects. This is because we must concentrate the resources in the field of research and to do this around the laser infrastructure project at Magurele and to award the research money for scientific quality and not other interests as it was often the case in the past.

ELI-NP
THE ELI - NUCLEAR PHYSICS FACILITY

To be built in Bucharest-Magurele, 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 since, unlike the other other two pillars, it will host not one, but two machines:

- 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;

- A very intense (10¹³ γ/s), brilliant γ beam, 0.1 % bandwidth, with E_v = 19 MeV, which is obtained by incoherent Compton back scattering of a laser light off a very brilliant, intense, classical electron beam (E_e = 600 MeV). The brilliant bunched electron beam will be produced by a warm linac using the X-band technology.

ELI-NP will create a new European laboratory to consistently investigate for the first time a new frontier of physics: the laser - nucleus frontier. A very broad range of science domains will thus open for highly advanced research, from new fields of fundamental physics, new nuclear physics and astrophysics, to applications in nuclear materials, nuclear materials management, material science and life sciences.

At the unprecedented parameters of the ELI-NP machines, important breakthroughs can be expected: • the study of new fundamental processes in high field QED • major progress in nuclear physics and the understanding of element synthesis in astrophysics • first catalysed pair creation from the quantum vacuum • performing parity violation experiments • developing techniques for remote characterization of nuclear materials or radioactive waste • advances in materials and life sciences due to new types of neutron and positron sources.

	2009, October, 16-21-Romania, Brasov: LEI
2009, October, 16-21 Romania, Brasov: LEI - Light at Extreme Intensities. The first ELI General conference

	Prague: ELI Delivery Consortium - Kick-off meeting
Memorandum Of Understanding

	ELI-NP The Way Ahead
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ELI-NP

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