On May 29-31 Krakow warmly welcomed scientific collaborators from all four Visegrad countries, including ELI Beamlines representatives, under the umbrella of the Visegrad Closure meeting 2022. The three-day event included a teambuilding activity (visit of the famous Wieliczka salt mines) and SOLARIS facility tour, followed by lectures and discussions. Thanks to the hybrid mode of the meeting, some participants who could not come to Krakow, were able to join the talks and discussions online.
The event was held in a framework of the collaboration that was launched in 2017. Since then, scientists from The Henryk Niewodniczański Institute of Nuclear Physics Polish Academy of Sciences (PL), Wigner Research Centre for Physics (HU), Institute of Physical Chemistry Polish Academy of Sciences (IChF) and Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice (SK) have been meeting regularly to help ELI Beamlines team build and develop the X-ray spesctroscopy end station in the E1 experimental hall. The last collaboration round, running from October 2020, was led by ELI Beamlines and involved also specialists from the optical spectroscopy field as a complementary method to the X-ray spectroscopy. The round started with a kick-off meeting, integrated in the ICEL User Conference 2020, and included three user experimental campaigns (one in X-ray spectroscopy and two in optical spectroscopy) held at ELI Beamlines.
At the Closure meeting, the collaboration members met together to discuss the achieved results and plans for the future. All the previous rounds have demonstrated this form of partnership was very successful leaving no doubts the scientists will apply for Visegrad funding to continue. SOLARIS will join the next Visegrad application. This will bring a new dimension to the collaboration uniting two largest user facilities in the region.
On top of that, with one voice the members supported continuation of the collaboration on the CELIXS (Consortium at ELI for X-ray spectroscopy, established in 2020) platform. CELIXS meetings are held every two months online. This helps keep in touch and updated on the progress of the ELI X-ray spectroscopy end station as well as recent advances in the field.
The PI of the 2020/2022 Visegrad round Anna Zymaková (ELI BL) expresses gratitude to Jakub Szlachetko – Director of Scientific Affairs at Solaris – and Alicja Górkiewicz ¬– Head of Solaris User Office – for hosting the meeting at the Solaris premises and help with organization, as well as to all the collaboration members. We look forward to future joint experiments, challenges and scientific advances!
