International research and technology facility for high-powered laser experimentation wins award for 'Best industrial & logistics development
London, March 2016 - Bogle Architects has won the 'Best industrial and logistics development' MIPIM Award for its ELI Beamlines project. The practice were the lead designers of the project from concept design through to authorship review.
The European Commission part funded the construction of the centre, which was completed in December 2015. Representatives of the international scientific community, ESFRI, the ELI Delivery Consortium and key partners from the Czech Government all attended the opening ceremony.
The ELI (Extreme Light Infrastructure) Beamlines facility houses lasers with intensities ten times higher than those currently achievable. The research centre was conceived as a campus within a landscaped setting. It consists of four separate buildings that accommodate offices, laboratories, a multi-functional space with lecture theatre/café, and the principal element: a massive concrete ‘box’, the size to a football pitch that houses the laser hall itself.
The lasers installed within the complex will be used for research into material sciences and engineering, medicine, biology, chemistry, pharmacy and astrophysics. This new generation of laser technology will make important contributions to cancer diagnosis and therapy.
ELI Beamlines is the first laser research infrastructure involving scientists from the global research community and is recognised as one of the European Union’s most significant research projects. It will develop a high-energy, high repetition-rate laser providing pulses from four laser systems (L1-L4). To meet the requirement for high repetition rates, three (L1-3) of these lasers will employ state of the art technologies of diode-pumped solid state lasers (DPSSL) for driving broadband amplifiers. The fourth (L4), multi-kilojoule laser will use a newly developed flash lamp technology with an actively cooled gain medium.
ELI will conduct experiments involving ion and electron accelerations. Laser driven particle acceleration is a new field of Physics, rapidly evolving thanks to the continuing development of high power laser systems enabling investigation of the interaction of ultra-high laser intensities with matter. In the future, laser accelerated electrons will be used to build compact electron-positron colliders or a full-optical X-ray free electron laser (XFEL), while laser accelerated ions will be fundamental in the development of full-optical hadrontherapy facilities for cancer treatment.
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Viktorie Soucek
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Robert Torday
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