Science of Extreme Light Infrastructure

The infrastructure of Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) provides an unprecedented opportunity for a broad range of frontier science. Its highest ever intensity of lasers, as well as high fluence, high power, and/or ultrafast optical characteristics carve out new territories of discovery, ranging from attosecond science to photonuclear science, laser acceleration and associated beams, and high field science (Four Pillars of ELI). Its applications span from medicine, biology, engineering, energy, chemistry, physics, and fundamental understanding of the Universe. The relativistic optics that intense lasers have begun exploring may be extended into a new regime of ultra‐relativistic regime, where even protons fly relativistically in the optical fields. ELI provides the highest intensity to date such that photon fields begin to feel even the texture of vacuum. This is a singular appeal of ELI with its relatively modest infrastructure (compared to the contemporary largest scientific infrastructures), yet provides an exceptional avenue along which the 21st Century science and society need to answer the toughest questions. The intensity frontier simultaneously brings in the energy horizon (TeV and PeV) as well as temporal frontier (attoseconds and zeptoseconds). It also turns over optics of atoms and molecules into that of nuclei with the ability to produce monoenergetic collimated γ‐ray photons. As such, the ELI concept acutely demands an effort to encompass and integrate its Four Pillars

FLASH -- the first soft x-ray free electron laser (FEL) user facility

International audienceThe free electron laser FLASH at DESY in Hamburg is the first X-ray FEL ever built. Many new developments were necessary in order to exploit the unique properties of this novel light source for scientific experiments. The facility has constantly been improved and several major upgrades have been made or are currently underway. The article reviews the main characteristics of the user facility as well as the major developments and upgrades

The monochromator beamline at FLASH: performance, capabilities and upgrade plans

The monochromator beamline at the FLASH facility at DESY is the worldwide first XUV monochromator beamline operational on a free electron laser (FEL)source. Being a single-user machine, FLASH demands a high flexibility of the instrumentation to fulfil the needs of diverse experiments performed by a multidisciplinary user community. Thus, the beamline has not only been used for high-resolution spectroscopy that it was originally designed for, but also for pump-probe experiments controlling the temporal-spectral properties at moderate resolution, and as a filter for high harmonics of the FEL at very low resolution. The present performance and capabilities of the beamline are discussed with emphasis on particularities arising from the nature of the FEL source, and current developments are presented aiming to enhance its capabilities for accommodating a wide variety of experiments