Attosecond Laser Facility Awards €1.4M in Secondary-Source Contracts

Leaders of the Extreme Light Infrastructure Attosecond Light Pulse Source (ELI-ALPS) facility planned for the city of Szeged recently signed contracts totaling €1.4 million for development of four secondary light sources.

The contracts were awarded to the University of Lund in Sweden, the Institute of Photonics and Nanotechnology of the Italian National Research Council (IFN-CNR) and the Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas (FORTH) in Greece. Each contract is worth €350,000 and calls for installation of the secondary sources between April 2016 and the end of 2017.

"The projects launched today involve our partners in engineering the secondary sources beamlines driven by high-repetition and single-cycle so-called SYLOS laser systems," said professor Karoly Osvay, research technology director at ELI-ALPS. "For the perfect operation of these devices, we will have to procure further hardware infrastructure for approximately €6 million."

In November, a consortium led by Ekspla UAB of Lithuania won a contract worth more than €4 million to develop the SYLOS lasers, which are based on optical parametric amplification principles.

Expected to complete the secondary light sources in 2020, ELI-ALPS will focus on applications in biology, biophysics and medicine, chemistry, materials science, and energy. Near-infrared femtosecond pulses will drive the secondary sources, producing terahertz, midwave IR, UV, extreme UV and x-ray pulses with duration from a few picoseconds to attoseconds, depending on the wavelength.

The total cost of the project (including Hungary’s contribution) amounts to €130.5 million.

For more information, visit www.eli-hu.hu.