ELI project
ELI will be a new scientific infrastructure devoted to scientific research in lasers' field, dedicated to the investigation and applications of laser-matter interaction at the highest intensity level (more than 6 orders of magnitude higher than today's laser intensity).
The ELI project, a collaboration of 13 European countries, will comprise three branches:
Ultra High Field Science that will explore laser-matter interaction in an energy range where relativistic laws could stop to be valid;
Attosecond Laser Science designed to conduct temporal investigation of electron dynamics in atoms, molecules, plasmas and solids at attosecond scale (10-18 sec.: a billion of billions of a second);
the High Energy Beam Science devoted to the development and usage of dedicated beam lines with ultra short pulses of high energy radiation and particles reaching almost the speed of light (100 GeV).
Scientific background
Laser intensities have increased by 6 orders of magnitude in the last years reaching a frontier where the laws of optics change in a fundamental way. This new optics field is called Relativistic Optics.
Among the important by-products of this field there are the generation of particles, x-ray and gamma-ray beams. The wealth of discoveries made in the relativistic regime justifies going further to the ultra-relativistic regime. One important aspect of ELI is the possibility to produce ultra-short pulses of high energy photons, electrons, protons, neutrons, muons and neutrinos in the attosecond and possibly zeptosecond (10-21 sec.) regimes on demand. Time-domain studies will allow unravelling the attosecond dynamics in atomic, molecular and plasma physics.
Foreseen impact
ELI will be the gateway to new regimes in physics. At the same time, it will also promote new technologies such as Relativistic Microelectronic with the development of compact laser-accelerators delivering particles and photon sources with extremely high energies (more than 100 GeV).
ELI will have a large societal benefit in medicine with new radiography and hadron therapy methods. It will also considerably contribute to material science with the possibility to unravel and slow down the aging process in nuclear reactors and in the environment by offering new ways to treat nuclear wastes.
Timeline
The Preparatory Phase (PP) of the ELI project started in November 2008 and will last till November 2010. This design study is foreseen to be followed by a five year construction period.
