Europe leads the way in laser research

Europe leads the way in laser research
By Aurora Velez
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The ELI Beamlines centre in the Czech Republic is building the most powerful laser in the world

Georg Korn is one of the pioneers of ELI Beamlines. 

This ultra-powerful laser centre, along with two others, in Romania and in Hungary, is part of the EUs strategy to be at the forefront of research and its applications in science, industry and medicine. 

But what is ELI?

Korn, Chief Scientist for Experimental Programmes and Engineering, told Euronews:

"First of all, we are a scientific facility so we do basic research. This is our mission of course, in different areas. We are in the family of 'photon based science'. So we generate photons like particles and we use them to do different things. We have a single entry point where scientific people or other users will submit their proposals. We will be peer-reviewing them. Their proposals are ranked (according to) their quality. And then we'll be assigning laser or so called 'beam time', depending on what they want to do. We're assigning this time free of charge, and they can do their research.

"We have three very interesting lasers and the last one which we will be installing and getting ready for use in the next year is a 10 Petawatt laser and there is nothing arround in the world which could do that at this point".

"Every day I am a little bit more proud"

"This building has 35,000 cubic metres of concrete in it," he said, referring to the site at Dolní Břežany in the Czech Republic. 

"We have over 10,000 tonnes of metal. This is more metal than the Eiffel Tower has and so we have built a very rigid building to do those investigations and now the materials are arriving, the lasers are coming, we are building the lasers. Now we are getting online, we are getting to the users, so every day I am a little bit more proud".

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