Anna Zymakova: Introduction to ELI-Beamlines

Introduction to ELI-Beamlines – a new user facility in the heart of Europe. Status and prospective of ELI X-ray spectroscopy end-station

Improved access to state-of-the-art facilities is a key element to groundbreaking advances in science. One such facility is the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI); a pan-European project of which one pillar (ELI-Beamlines) is located near Prague in Czech Republic. The new facility utilizes ultra-high power lasers in research projects aimed at studying intense light/matter interactions as well as making use of short pulsed lasers to drive secondary X-ray and XUV sources (such as Plasma X-ray sources, Betatron, High-order Harmonic generation etc.) and particle accelerators (electrons and ions) for applications in material science, biomedicine, laboratory astrophysics etc. The E1 experimental hall at ELI Beamlines houses a few secondary sources that generate beams in wide, complementary, energy ranges, as well as end-stations that will be used for correlative ultrafast experiments. Particularly, the station for time-resolved experiments with X-rays (TREX) includes diffractometry and spectroscopy setup for pump-probe X-ray experiments. These will use plasma X-ray sources driven by the in-house developed L1-ALLEGRA laser (1kHz, 100mJ, <20fs laser pulses @830nm), as well as conventional support lasers. The presentation will give a short overview of the ELI project and ELI-Beamlines structure. I will focus on the status and outlook of the x-ray spectroscopy station currently under development for an improved user availability for high demand ultrafast x-ray techniques.

References:

1. F. Batysta et al., Opt. Express 24, 17843 (2016) https://doi.org/10.1364/OE.24.017843