2016 - 11 - 04
The first yearly meeting of the Horizon2020 project “European Plasma Research Accelerator with eXcellence In Applications” took place at the École polytechnique in Paris, on 26 – 28 October. Ralph Assmann from DESY, project coordinator, and Arnd Specka, deputy coordinator and host of the meeting, welcomed 59 registered participants from the 16 partner institutes, from the associate partners and from industry. The EuPRAXIA scientists enjoyed the unique atmosphere of excellence at the “École”, where famous mathematicians and scientists like Cauchy, Coriolis, Poincaré, Poisson, Mandelbrot, Becquerel, Carnot and Fresnel changed our world and where today some of the world brightest students train for the future
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The EuPRAXIA yearly meeting discussed a very fruitful first project year, which included the forming of the collaboration, hiring of new personnel, investigation of facility parameters and a total of eleven workshops. These meetings covered all aspects of this highly innovative project, bringing together up to 120 participants per event. The scientific results from the meetings were reported, including interesting new insights and future directions.
An executive session of the EuPRAXIA collaboration board was held on October 27. Massimo Ferrario from LNF-INFN was elected chairman for two years. The collaboration board approved unanimously the participation of six new associate partners: Karlsruhe Institute of Technology KIT (Germany), Forschungszentrum Jülich FZJ (Germany), The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel), the University of Roma "Tor Vergata" (Italy) and from the Russian Academy of Sciences the Institute of Applied Physics and the Joint Institute for High Temperatures. Now a total of 38 world-class institutions support EuPRAXIA. In addition the collaboration board approved the companies of Thales (France), Amplitude (France) and TRUMPF Scientific (Germany) as members of the EuPRAXIA Advisory Board.
The meeting finished with presentations on CILEX (France), EuSPARC (Italy), SINBAD/ATHENAe (Germany) and the Gemini Upgrade project (UK). These projects offer major capabilities for innovative acceleration technologies and high power laser drivers. As national initiatives they operate in a highly innovative and competitive research field, where major activities in the US and Asia are competing with Europe for technological leadership. The participants discussed existing facilities and future work with a focus on the 2019 EuPRAXIA design report, while starting some first brainstorming on the ESFRI roadmap and possible sites for a future research infrastructure EuPRAXIA in Europe.
All presentations and further information can be found on the event’s indico page.
Photograph of the participants in the 1st yearly meeting of EuPRAXIA. Copyright Pieyre Sylvaine, LLR.