Today, the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, together with his Czech counterpart, Petr Nečas, paid a visit to the Prague Asterix Laser System (PALS), where they exchanged on the furthering of scientific co-operation between the Czech Republic, the UK and other members of the EU. A very significant illustration of this co-operation is the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI), one of Europe’s most ambitious scientific projects in the last two decades.
“Britain has been and remains at the forefront of innovation in the science and technology sectors. I’m pleased to see the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and other UK organisations play such an important role in the development of these sectors in the Czech Republic,“ said David Cameron.
Petr Nečas noted: “For countries like ours, with limited human and capital resources, there are not many ways of ensuring our sustainable involvement in the world of research, development and innovation. Research centres of excellence are actually the only solution. We have to develop our research infrastructures through collaboration with top-level scientific institutes of all around Europe − and the United Kingdom has most certainly a leading role in the world of science.“
Both Prime Ministers visited PALS, which is to date the largest laser facility in Central and Eastern Europe. PALS has been a key instrument for the establishment of long-term collaboration between the Czech laser community and research teams from all over Europe. However, with the rising interest of researchers for high-intensity lasers, ambitious initiatives were needed to meet this demand. Cameron and Nečas underlined that ELI will be several orders of magnitude above PALS and this leap towards extreme light will position ELI as a leading research facility in Europe and the world in its field. The research infrastructure will give access to laser systems delivering ultra-high light intensities for the study of matter under extreme conditions and for the production and use of various kinds of sources and accelerated particles. This will allow research opportunities in a wide range of disciplines (biology, chemistry, material sciences, medicine) for the scientific community and the industry.
ELI will be the first ever laser research infrastructure resulting from an international effort. ELI indeed is a truly European venture since more than 40 research institutes from 13 EU Member States took part in the activities preparing its implementation.
The role of the United Kingdom has been and remains a crucial one: “Our collaboration with the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory is of paramount importance for the success of ELI as we expect the Central Laser Facility to take an active part in the development of some of the key and innovative components of the laser system,” Vlastimil Růžička, the plenipotentiary of the Czech Government for ELI and vice-director of the Institute of Physics, said. There are opportunities for scientific collaboration, but also for business, Prof. Růžička insisted . ELI already enjoys the services of several British companies, which are involved in the architectural design of the facility (BFLS), in technical supervision (Gleeds), and in engineering and technology consultancy.
A meeting is already planned in the UK in the first half of July between the ELI team and its UK partners to discuss the terms of this collaboration.
Marketa Holubova ELI Czech management team Institute of Physics, v.v.i. Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic Na Slovance 2 182 21 Prague 8
Tel.: (+420) 266052207 (office) Fax: (+420) 286890265 E-mail: holubm@fzu.cz https://www.eli-beams.eu/
