The Conceptual Design Report of EuPRAXIA, published in 2019, and the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) proposed a distributed implementation of the EuPRAXIA facility, with several Centers of Excellence scattered around Europe and two construction sites, one for particle-driven plasma acceleration in Frascati (Italy), and one for laser-driven acceleration, in a location to be determined.
This approach was very much favored by the community and the governments consulted. Now, the EuPRAXIA consortium is working to define more in detail what the distributed scheme entails, and the kind of additional resources that will be needed from all the partners.
A meeting was held on 2 October at ELI-ERIC, in Dolni Brezany (near Prague) to continue the discussion about the distributed concept of EuPRAXIA and the ESFRI recommendation.
The facility is one of the proposed centers of excellence and it has been identified by the EuPRAXIA community as one of the candidates for hosting the laser-driven plasma accelerator.
Participants at the workshop had the opportunity to review the research and development progress at ELI-ERIC in all aspects relevant to the objectives of EuPRAXIA. The presentations covered all current activities at the facility representing the status and plan for a nearest future for the L2-DUHA and LUIS technology development, aiming incoherent and, later-on, coherent (SASE and seeded FEL) user-oriented operation at ELI-ERIC.
In the frame of the round-table discussion, participants continued the discussions about organization of the collaboration within the EuPRAXIA consortium, which is needed to realize such an ambitious project, as well as financial aspects. The delegates agreed that the EuPRAXIA collaborative activity should be realized though the national Centers of Excellence, which should coordinate the collaboration between the EuPRAXIA construction sites (both, the laser-driven and the particle-driven) and EuPRAXIA clusters distributed around Europe.
Until the end of the year, similar workshops will be organized in UK and Spain to visit the new facilities EPAC-STFC (Didcot, UK) and CLPU (Salamanca, Spain).