EUCALL completes Mid Term Review and 2nd Annual Meeting

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“Project has delivered exceptional results”

In June 2017, the European Cluster of Advanced Laser Light Sources (EUCALL) completed its Mid Term Review in Brussels, during which the EUCALL coordinator team and work package leaders presented the project’s progress and achievements to the EU project officer and an external reviewer.  

The review recognised that EUCALL has fully achieved its objectives and milestones for the first funding period and is creating a wealth of advanced results, instruments, and tools. The review specifically emphasized and supported EUCALL’s compiled spreadsheet of “Instrumentation at Advanced Laser Light Sources”, which contains characteristics of instruments at synchrotron, FEL and optical laser facilities. The spreadsheet was described as an “invaluable document”, especially when the collected data will be transferred to the public www.wayforlight.eu database for users of facilities in the EUCALL community to identify the most suitable instruments/beamlines for a defined experiment.

The development of EUCALL’s SIMEX tool was also highlighted as a significant result. SIMEX is a new open-source simulation platform for users and facility operators to simulate experiments “from source to detector” at advanced light sources. It includes software developed and put together in one package for the simulation of experiments at the different light sources. SIMEX currently supports simulations of coherent diffractive imaging, as well as of imaging and scattering experiments on laser-excited or compressed matter. SIMEX is publicly available for download at www.github.com/eucall-software/simex_platform.

The reviewer also identified EUCALL’s networking activities around newer concepts and approaches to be of great value for structuring an emerging community. EUCALL is organising one workshop on “Biology at Advanced Laser Light Sources” (30 Nov/ 1 Dec 2017 at European XFEL). The focus on biology applications was selected since these are currently of very high relevance to all of the participating facilities. The workshop will allow understanding of what the synergies between the different sub-groups are, as well as how to identify and develop them and later to extend these synergies into other communities. A second workshop on “High Impact Science at Advanced Laser Light Sources” – to be held at DESY in spring 2018 – will address urgent scientific and societal challenges and how EUCALL’s facilities could contribute to solving these. A further topic deals with building a network for target delivery at high–repetition-rate laser facilities. Full details of EUCALL’s upcoming workshops can be found at www.eucall.eu/events.

Also in June, EUCALL held its 2nd Annual Meeting at ESRF in Grenoble. Sixty-six project participants gathered to present and discuss the project progress and status. A plenary session addressed photon beam characteristics and applications of FEL, synchrotron, and various optical laser driven x-ray beams and one session was dedicated to discuss possible collaboration after the EUCALL project ends in September 2018. In the open discussion that followed, the participants unanimously agreed to continue EUCALL’s cooperation in the future.