On 19th September 2023, two important projects of the ELI Beamlines facility HiFI and ELIBIO were officially finished. Their leaders Janos Hajdu (ELIBIO) and Sergei Bulanov (HiFI) presented the progress of the projects, their results and achievements of individual members of each team. The contribution of both projects not only to the ELI Beamlines facility, but also to the wide scientific community is obvious and much appreciated. The projects have already been finished but the work of teams is still continuing.
The project ELIBIO started in December 2016 and finished in March 2023. Its leader was Janos Hajdu, and he created an excellent team with his colleagues from ELI Beamlines in collaboration with the Institute of Biotechnology at BIOCEV. The one of goals was to establish an Interdisciplinary Centre of Excellence in Life Sciences and that was completely successful. An advanced biological laboratory (Biolab) was built and equipped and is hosted at ELI Beamlines, located in the laser building close to experimental halls. The ELIBIO team has produced many articles published in well-impact scientific journals as Nature Photonics, Science Advances, FEBS Journal etc. One of the unique technologies in Biolab is a stimulated Raman spectroscopy station. There are about ten laboratories in the world that can measure stimulated Raman and one of them is at ELI Beamlines.
The High Field Initiative (HiFI) project was established to be the leading project in the high field science. It aimed at obtaining scientific results in the field of ultra-intense laser matter interaction providing theoretical support and upgrade of 10 PW laser at ELI Beamlines for the conducting of worldwide unique high-field flagship experiments. In parallel conducted extensive computer simulations. The team around the leader Sergei V. Bulanov published about 150 scientific publications and reached a lot of interesting results; Hedvika Kadlecová was awarded L’Oreal-UNESCO prize for Women in Science 2019, Petr Valenta won the Best Poster Awards (EPS 2019, ELISS 2021) and Sergei Bulanov received the Order of Rising Sun with Gold Rays and Rosette in 2020.
