First major contract placed with STFC's laser centre

The Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) project in the Czech Republic has awarded its first major contract to STFC’s new Centre for Advanced Laser Technology and Applications (CALTA). ELI is a multi million euro project being carried out in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania to create a world class laser capability. The £2.2M contract awarded to CALTA is for a cutting-edge laser amplifier that can supply bursts of laser energy with power equivalent to that of a full-sized power station, for a brief instant, ten times every second. On Friday 29 June 2012 the Director of the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences in the Czech Republic, Prof Jan Ridky, visited STFC’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory to seal the contract.

It is intended that the new ELI laser will operate at ten times a second (ten Hertz) producing ten Joules per pulse. Later in their development programme, ELI is looking to produce a laser operating at a similar repetition rate but ten times this energy (100 Joules). ELI will use this to amplify ultrashort pulses of laser energy to power levels above 1 Petawatt, the instantaneous equivalent of 2,000 power stations per pulse. 100 Joules is currently only possible using large systems such as the Vulcan laser in the Central Laser Facility at the STFC’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, with only one shot every 20 minutes maximum. The CALTA technology is demonstrably scalable to this level, and beyond a report said.