At final EUCALL meeting in Brussels, future plans are established

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Letter of Intent signed to form the EUCALL Forum after the end of project

On 6 September 2018, the final EUCALL event, a meeting entitled “Future Strategies for Research Infrastructures - The benefits of cross-community clusters: EUCALL’s perspective”, took place in Brussels, Belgium. Attended by over 50 people from the infrastructures participating in EUCALL as well as representatives of science academies and the European Commission, the workshop served as a way to sum up EUCALL’s achievements and its impact, as well as setting up an agreement on how to continue EUCALL’s bridging between light sources.

Phillipe Froissand, the Deputy Head of the Research Infrastructures Unit of the European Commission, opened the meeting with a keynote address giving context to how cluster projects fit into the broader European Research Area and potential for new collaboration. Another keynote speaker was Prof. Roger Falcone, Professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and President of the American Physical Society, who compared different collaboration projects around the world and emphasized the uniqueness of EUCALL’s approach.

At the end of the meeting, representatives of the research infrastructures participating in EUCALL signed an agreement to later formally develop a “EUCALL Forum”, which will serve as a platform to continue EUCALL's collaboration between accelerator- and laser-based light sources. Signing the Letter of Intent were European XFEL, DESY, HZDR, and FZ Juelich in Germany; CNRS and ESRF in France; Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste in Italy; MAX-IV at Lund University in Sweden; and ELI (represented by its Delivery Consortium in Belgium) in Czechia, Hungary, and Romania. Also signing were representatives of the two Europe-wide networks FELs of Europe and Laserlab-Europe. The next step is the definition of a Memorandum of Understanding to define the underlying principles of the EUCALL Forum.