Proton-boron fuel requires implosion to burn. In order to build a correct model of the implosion process driven by a high energy laser, we need to understand the material properties and behaviour of the boron fuel under extreme pressures and temperatures. This is no simple task as we’re talking about millions of atmospheric pressures and millions to billions of Kelvins (degrees), occurring after petawatts (1,000 trillion watts) of energy have passed through fuel no bigger than a millimetre in size.

Boost for Inertial Fusion Energy (IFE) in Germany: The PriFUSIO research project aims to systematically develop key technologies for climate-neutral fusion power plants of the future. The consortium, led by the ILT in Aachen, brings together fusion start-ups, medium-sized companies, large corporations, the Laser Zentrum Hannover, and the Fraunhofer Institutes IOF in Jena and ILT in Aachen, creating a diverse collaboration of industry and public research institutions. The project will focus on principles for targeted component development and explore practical photonic approaches for the commercial utilization of laser-driven IFE. The Federal Ministry of Education and Research has allocated 18 million euros for the project over the next three years.

Ignition was the dominant theme at this year's LLNL National Ignition Facility and Jupiter Laser Facility (NIF and JLF) User Groups Meeting.

The experimental physicist joins the Max Born Institute as a new Director and has accepted a chair at Humboldt University of Berlin.

"Ready? Signal sent!" In the control room of a research center in Romania, engineer Antonia Toma activates the world's most powerful laser, which promises revolutionary advances in everything from the health sector to space.

The 19th Direct Drive and Fast Ignition Workshop (DDFIW) contains a series of meetings dedicated to inertial confinement research in Europe. DDFIW provides a unique opportunity for European and overseas scientists working in theory, simulations, and experiments to present and discuss their latest results and future plansin an informal atmosphere. The meeting also addresses new schemes for inertial confinement fusion and related science at the cutting edge of high energy density physics research. Important dates: LPI satellite meeting: 21 May 2024; DDFIW workshop: 22-24 May 2024

European Union funds CASUS research project with 700,000 euros

The Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) is set to launch the 4th ELI User Call on 25 March with an open Call period until 29 April. This Call will continue to support a wide range of experiments, leveraging ELI's state-of-the-art equipment at ELI ALPS and ELI Beamlines. Researchers and scientists worldwide are invited to submit their proposals which will be evaluated based on scientific excellence by an international peer-review panel.

In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, researchers from the University of Rochester, along with colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, discovered a new class of plasma oscillations—the back-and-forth, wave-like movement of electrons and ions. The findings have implications for improving the performance of miniature particle accelerators and the reactors used to create fusion energy.

Michelle Marshall has been appointed as the new leader for the High-Energy-Density Physics (HEDP) Experiments Group in the Experimental Division, bringing her extensive expertise in studying materials under extreme conditions to the forefront.

Laserlab-Europe Talk: 1. Lasers, related radiation sources and diagnostics at ENEA-Frascati for applications to material science, radiation hardness of materials and components. 2. Radiation sources based on laser plasma interaction and applications in materials science.

Following ignition demonstrations at the National Ignition Facility, the prospect of developing a fusion energy source using lasers looks brighter than ever. Here, SLAC experts weigh in on what it will take to develop the science and technology toward that aim and how the lab and its partners will contribute.

The DOE Office of Accelerator Research and Development and Production organized a Basic Research Needs workshop to assess R&D needed to enable high-impact scientific applications of laser technology to address current and future needs.

Prof. Peter Norreys has received the prestigious Edward Teller Award from the American Nuclear Society for his influential work in using lasers to generate particles for scientific applications such as fast ignition fusion.

Studies using recent ignition experiments indicate an upgrade to 3 MJ of laser energy at NIF could increase fusion output by a factor of 10, resulting in yields in the 30 MJ range. A proposal, still in the early stages, could turn this idea into reality.

This interdisciplinary school will bring together all research areas within EuPRAXIA-DN and will be held in the 'Eternal City' Rome in Italy from 22-26 April 2024. Registration deadline: 29th February 2024

PhD Academy on Energy and Society. The Case of Fusion, June 10-15, 2024, application deadline February 29, 2024.

The Oxford Laser Plasma Accelerators Group have demonstrated a solution to two key challenges in laser-driven plasma accelerators, allowing them to potentially reach higher energies over smaller distances. 

We are pleased to announce the 37th European Conference on Laser Interaction with Matter (ECLIM 2024), to be held in Lisbon, Portugal, on 16-20th of September 2024. The Conference will be held at the IST Congress Centre, Instituto Superior Técnico, Alameda Campus, Lisbon.

European scientists are reinvigorating pan-European plans for laser fusion energy.

Osaka University (OU) invites applications for a full-time faculty position at the rank of Professor in the Laser Fusion Science Research Division at the Institute of Laser Engineering (ILE).

Rob Shalloo, a staff scientist in the Plasma Accelerators group at DESY, has been selected by the German Research Foundation (DFG) for the prestigious Emmy Noether Programme.

ATAP researchers aim to develop next-generation algorithms to advance our understanding of laser-driven inertial fusion energy.

The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for the development of attosecond science – a field that sheds light on the movement of electrons on their natural timescale. Several researchers at the Swiss X-ray free electron laser SwissFEL are recognised in the scientific background to this prize. This is no coincidence. With recent technical developments enabling attosecond and fully coherent X-ray pulses, SwissFEL promises to rapidly advance this emerging research area.

The Hub IFE-COLoR (Inertial Fusion Energy-Consortium on LPI Research) has received $10 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Fusion Energy Science to advance research on inertial fusion energy science (IFE) and technology.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded a four-year, $16 million project to a multi-institutional team led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to accelerate inertial fusion energy (IFE) science and technology. This effort will be carried out by the newly established IFE Science and Technology Accelerated Research for Fusion Innovation and Reactor Engineering (STARFIRE) Hub.

Europe's largest laser research capability, the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI ERIC), this week declared their commitment to the mission of laser fusion at a dedicated two-day workshop in Prague.

The 10th International Conference on Ultrahigh Intensity Lasers (ICUIL 2024) will take place on the island of Cozumel, Mexico from Sept. 9th to 13rd 2024. Cozumel is a quiet island in the Caribbean Sea, off the eastern coast of Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula.

AAC2024 will be held at the Big Sky Resort in Big Sky, Montana, on Sunday, June 9th – Friday, June 14th, 2024.

The 50th Conference of Plasma Physics will be organized in Salamanca, Spain, from 8 to 12 July 2024

On Oct. 30, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)'s National Ignition Facility (NIF) set a new record for laser energy, firing 2.2 megajoules (MJ) of energy for the first time on an ignition target. This experiment resulted in 3.4 MJ of fusion energy yield, achieving ignition and delivering the second-highest neutron yield ever achieved on NIF.

ELI User Meeting will be organized in Szeged, Hungary, December 4. – .5. ,2023.

A new generation DiPOLE laser, delivering 10 J pulses at 100 Hz repetition rate (1 kW average power) has been developed and commissioned by the CALTA team at the CLF as part of the Widespread collaboration with HiLASE (Czech Republic).

Naturally occurring subatomic particles called muons can help us see inside places like the Great Pyramid of Giza. Now LLNL has partnered with industry and academic partners to rapidly generate muons using lasers.

The article entitled "10 PW peak power femtosecond laser pulses at ELI-NP" was selected as the 2022 High Power Laser Science and Engineering Editor-in-Chief Choice Award paper.

On October 16-19, 2023, the 5th International Symposium on High Power Laser Science and Engineering (HPLSE2023) & Celebration on the 10th Anniversary of the Journal High Power Laser Science and Engineering (HPL) took place in Suzhou, China. At the forum, HPL launched two awards: HPLSE Outstanding Contribution Award and Excellent Article for HPLSE 10th Anniversary.

High Power Laser Science and Engineering (HPLSE) was publicized at the 5th Conference on Extremely High Intensity Laser Physics (ExHILP 2023) which was held at Center for Relativistic Laser Science (CoReLS), Gwangju, Republic of Korea from Sep. 12 to 15 in 2023.

Rochester-based Sydor Technologies has been awarded a $200,000 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to work with the LLE to assess the commercial feasibility of the mid-scale plasma-electrode Pockels Cell (mPEPC) system developed at LLE.

The fiber laser group at the Institute of Applied Physics (IAP) at Friedrich Schiller University Jena is actively involved in the development of such new generation lasers and we are recruiting.

The U.S. Department of Energy recently announced $28.5 million in funding to LaserNetUS to further advance discovery science and inertial fusion energy (IFE) research.

John Collier, Director of the Central Laser Facility (CLF), an institution of the Science and Technology Facilities Council at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, near Oxford, UK, has been elected as the new Executive Director of Laserlab-Europe AISBL.

The Intense Laser Irradiation Laboratory (ILIL), operating at the Pisa headquarters of the National Institute of Optics (INO) of the National Research Council (CNR) and led by Research Director Dr. Leonida A. Gizzi, has been welcomed as a new member of the laser infrastructure consortium “Laserlab-Europe AISBL”.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) has awarded a grant to HB11 Energy as part of its 'Innovation Network for Fusion Energy' (INFUSE) program with the objective, "to accelerate basic research to develop cost-effective, innovative fusion energy technologies in the private sector." The program will provide access to world-leading expertise from the Laboratory for Laser…

Experimental particle physicist Professor David Newbold has commenced work as STFC’s Executive Director of National Laboratories.

Laser–Plasma Interactions Group Leader, David Turnbull, was selected to receive the 2023 Edouard Fabre Prize for his pioneering contributions to inertial confinement fusion (ICF) through innovative laser–plasma instability studies.

Plasma accelerator AWAKE has tested scalability and is all set to begin its second phase of data taking with an upgraded plasma source.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology ILT invites the laser community to the 14th International Laser Technology Congress AKL in Aachen from April 17 to 19, 2024. At AKL'24, users, manufacturers and developers from various areas of the laser industry will have the opportunity to exchange information on the latest developments in the field of applied laser technology in production.

Laser physicists from the attoworld team at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ) and Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München (LMU) have developed a new and unique high-power laser system for driving the attosecond beamlines and ultrafast attosecond experiments at MPQ.

An experiment on a NIF Discovery Science research project was conducted by Dr. N. Iwata (Associate Professor, ILE) and the team at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the United States. 

DiPOLE100X (D100X), a laser we were recently commissioned to build, has smashed all expectations during its first official experiment at the European XFEL in Hamburg, Germany.

The HiLASE Centre wants to become one of the respected leaders defining the trends in high power laser applications. To be the first-choice R&D partner for companies and research organizations seeking innovative laser technologies and solutions, on the Earth and beyond…

Shock-induced hydrodynamics research at the Omega Laser Facility is advancing flow visualization at ultrahigh pressures.

BMBF-funded RUBIN consortium sets out with ambitious goals

A spinoff start-up company of the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) is among the first round of awardees of DOE's $46 million Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program, which supports public-private partnerships to speed the development of a pilot fusion power plant.

The 65th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics (DPP) will be held in Denver, Colorado, October 30-November 3, 2023. All technical sessions will be held in the DPP headquarters hotel, Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel, located at 1550 Court Place, Denver, Colorado 80202.

PLASMA 2023 International Conference on Research and Applications of Plasmas which will be held in September 18-22, 2023 in Warsaw, Poland.

The 5th Conference on Extremely High Intensity Laser Physics (ExHILP 2023) is held at Center for Relativistic Laser Science (CoReLS), Gwangju, Korea from Sep. 12 to 15 in 2023. It consists of 3 tutorial/keynote talks, 9 topical sessions accommodating invited and contributed talks, and 1 poster session.

The 20th International Symposium on Laser-Aided Plasma Diagnostics (LAPD20) is organized by National Institute for Fusion Science and Hokkaido University. LAPD20 will take place from Sunday, 10 September 2023 (evening reception) to Thursday 14 September 2023 at Kyoto Garden Palace Hotel in Kyoto, Japan.

We recently introduced 5 new application areas that the HiLASE Centre will focus on. The first is dedicated to advanced laser processing and manufacturing technologies. Its expert guarantor is Ing. Jan Brajer, Ph.D. (Head of Department: Industrial Laser Applications).

Ultrafast laser physicists from the attoworld team at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ) and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU) have gained new insights into the dynamics of electrons in solids immediately after photoinjection.

Applications are now invited for access to the Artemis laser facility at the Central Laser Facility (CLF) (Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) Rutherford Appleton Laboratory), during the period December 2023 - June 2024. A total of fourteen weeks' access is available on the facility. We are offering access to both the 1-kHz and 100-kHz laser systems.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and University of California, Davis researchers are assisting Arizona State University with a new laser facility that will use ultrafast pulsed X-ray beams to study biological processes, materials and other research at the atomic level.

15th May 2023, marks the official Opening Ceremony for the CLF's brand-new building, the Engineering & Technology Centre (ETC).

We're building “Superlasers for the real world”. We offer innovative laser technologies and solutions, and effective applications in industry, while constantly pushing the boundaries of laser technology to benefit the Czech and European economy, as well as advancing laser use on Earth and beyond.

The elections were closed the 14th of April. The election committee has found that all voters are eligible and all votes valid. The three candidates obtaining the largest number of votes – Luca Volpe, Alexis Casner and Piotr Raczka – are elected in the Board. 

CLF Talking Science! On Friday 19 May 2023 (13:30 and 19:00), with Dr Andy Ward.

Professor Stewart Boogert will drive the continued growth and development of the Cockcroft Institute.

There are four term (two year) positions at CNR National Institute of Optics. One position is for senior researcher and three positions are for researcher. The deadline is 2nd May, 2023.

The fifth edition of the Conference will be held at Rethymno city in the island of Crete, Greece on April 23-27, 2023 at a time when the fusion developments are stronger than ever worldwide, boosted by the active collaboration of academic researchers and innovation partners, bringing new ideas for the exploration of innovative fusion plasma diagnostics.

The latest call for High Power Lasers is now open.

On April 20-21, 2023 the Laserlab- Europe meeting: “Network on Extreme Intensity Laser Systems” NEILS will be organized by The Centro de Láseres Pulsados (CLPU) in Salamanca.

Martin Smrz, head of the Advanced Laser Development department at the HiLASE Centre, will be attending the thirteenth instalment of the Ultrafast Optics (UFO XIII) conference taking place from the 26th to the 31st of March in San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentina.

The 13th edition of the Ultrafast Optics conference (UFO XIII) that will take place on the 26th - 31st of March 2023. The conference is planned to take place as a fully in person meeting.

A patent was awarded for "All-Optical, Optically Addressable Liquid Crystal-Based Light Valve Employing Photoswitchable Alignment Layer for High-Power and/or Large Aperture Laser Applications," based on research conducted in LLE's Optical Materials Technology (OMT) Group by Senior Research Engineer and Principal Investigator Kenneth L. Marshall and OMT Group Leader Stavros G. Demos.

The HiLASE Centre would like to invite you to participate in the annual LIDT Challenge. In this competition, we are going to test the samples of your anti-reflective coated windows. As a reward, you will gain qualified knowledge of the respective damage thresholds of your components.

At the HiLASE Centre, we offer our superb research infrastructure to other users, completely free of charge. In order to apply for the beamtime in our facility, you only need to send us your proposal via the electronic HiLASE Open Access Proposal Management System. The right time to apply is just now: the call for proposals is open from 1st March to 15th May 2023.

The 49th European Conference on Plasma Physics will be held in Bordeaux from the 3rd July to the 7th July in 2023 (Conference site: Bordeaux Congress Centre, Av. Jean Gabriel Domergue, 33300 Bordeaux). This annual conference covers the wide field of plasma physics including magnetic confinement fusion, beam plasma and inertial fusion, low temperature plasmas, and basic, space and astrophysical plasmas.

The 8th edition of the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) summer school will take place August 29th to September 1st, 2023 in ELI Beamlines facility, Czech Republic.

After successful recommissioning in autumn 2022, the Greifswald nuclear fusion experiment has surpassed an important target. In 2023, an energy turnover of 1 gigajoule was targeted. Now the researchers have even achieved 1.3 gigajoules and a new record for discharge time on Wendelstein 7-X: the hot plasma could be maintained for eight minutes.

The Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) is pleased to announce the 2nd Joint ELI Call for Users.

The 18th International Conference on X-Ray Laser will be held at Shanghai from Jul. 17 to 21. On ICXRL latest results on state-of-the-art X-ray Free-Electron Lasers (XFEL) as well as tabletop systems are presented.

Zhi Liao's path from laser scientist to his new role as workforce manager for NIF&PS has come full circle—and is rooted in his early days at LLNL.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has seated Marc-André De Looz, a senior engineer and project manager at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), to a four-year term on its Fusion Technology Standing Committee. De Looz's election maintains a strong PPPL voice on the committee,…

FLASH v4.7 expands the range of laboratory experiments the code can model in fields including high-energy-density physics and fusion energy.

European Physical Society Plasma Physics Innovation Prize "for technological, industrial or societal applications of research in plasma physics." The call for the 2023 round of nominations for the EPS Plasma Physics Innovation Prize is open till the 15th of February, 2023.

EuPRAXIA is the first European project that develops a dedicated particle accelerator research infrastructure based on novel plasma acceleration concepts and laser technology.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) today announced the achievement of fusion ignition at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) — a major scientific breakthrough decades in the making that will pave the way for advancements in national defense and the future of clean power.

US scientists may have reached a critical milestone in generating fusion power.

Call for access to OCTOPUS and ULTRA is now open. Applications for access to the Octopus and Ultra facilities of the Central Laser Facility (CLF) in the Research Complex at Harwell are open from Friday 25th November 2022.

A record high-laser-energy NIF target shot on Sept. 19 produced about 1.2 million joules of fusion energy yield, putting NIF back on track toward ignition.

Institute of Laser Engineering (ILE), Osaka University invites applications for a full-time faculty position at the rank of Associate Professor, who can lead the development of high-energy-density science based on laser science.

The conference of high intensity laser and attosecond science in Israel will be held at Tel-Aviv from Dec. 5th to 7th. Topics covering not only ICF and X-ray sources will be discussed.

The Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) Joint User Meeting will take place from 2-4 November 2022 with a central Plenary Day, on 3 November 2022. The meeting will be hosted in person at the ELI Facilities, with streaming options connecting the main programme and opportunities for participants to participate in sessions at all locations.

High Energy Density Science (HEDS) Center postdoctoral fellow Andrew Longman proposes using high-intensity lasers to generate electromagnetic vortices, which have recently been observed in association with black holes.

The exciting future of inertial fusion energy, laser science, and high energy density (HED) research was highlighted at a recent conference that brought together representatives of LaserNetUS, a network of 10 ultra-powerful laser facilities LaserNetUS Logothat includes LLNL's Jupiter Laser Facility (JLF), the institutional user facility in LLNL's Physical and Life Sciences Directorate.

The 13th International Laser Operations Workshop (ILOW), held at LLNL from Aug. 30 to Sept. 1, brought together more than 70 representatives from 11 laser facilities to discuss recent achievements and share how they are responding to various challenges to improve their systems.

Photonics giant Hamamatsu and research hub Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology (ILT) have announced the formation of an application lab designed specifically for advanced laser material processing with ultrashort pulsed laser radiation.

Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have completed a major expansion of one of the world's most powerful laser systems, creating new opportunities in accelerator research for the future of high-energy physics and other fields. 

LLNL researchers and their collaborators have developed new high-energy pulse compression gratings that will be used in the world's highest-power laser system, designed to deliver up to 10 petawatts (quadrillion watts) of peak power. A petawatt is roughly the power output of the entire U.S. electrical grid.

Two physicists at the Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have been named to high-level positions within DOE programs. Ahmed Diallo has become a program director focusing on fusion at the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), and Walter Guttenfelder is the new deputy director of the Innovation Network for Fusion Energy (INFUSE). 

Czechia-based laser research center ELI Beamlines, a division the Institute of Physics of Czech Academy of Sciences (FZU), has received funding from the Czech Foundation Agency to develop theoretical tools for modeling experiments at high-power laser facilities. And a new method for shaping matter into complex shapes, with the use of ‘twisted’ light, has been demonstrated in research at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers have designed a compact multi-petawatt laser that uses plasma transmission gratings to overcome the power limitations of conventional solid-state optical gratings. The design could enable construction of an ultrafast laser up to 1,000 times more powerful than existing lasers of the same size.

University of Delaware researcher Arijit Bose and his collaborators have applied powerful magnetic fields to the laser-driven implosion, which may allow them to steer fusion reactions in ways previously unexplored in experiments.

US scientists evaluate their options after failing to replicate record-setting experiment from 2021.

The XFEL Physical Sciences Hub is now welcoming proposals for a third cohort of PhD studentships.The deadline for proposals is 14th September 2022.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers are collaborating with the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, known as CEA, to help develop a cryogenic target system for the CEA's LMJ. The LMJ is a laser fusion counterpart to the National Ignition Facility (NIF), now conducting experiments near Bordeaux, France.

Subject to business case approvals, the CLF's Vulcan 20-20  project (The Vulcan 20-20 will deliver a major upgrade the existing Vulcan facility at Central Laser Facility) has been awarded £59.8m by UKRI, the project will take just over 6 years starting in 2023/24 and will cost £81M in total .

The U.S. National Science Foundation and the Czech Science Foundation, or GACR, are partnering on a new collaborative project of scientists from the University of California San Diego and Extreme Light Infrastructure Beamlines in the Czech Republic which aims at demonstrating efficient generation of dense gamma-ray beams.

Christopher Deeney has been named the new director of the University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics, succeeding Michael Campbell, who retired in December.   He is a leader in science and innovation with extensive experience in running complex operations. We welcome Chris as the fifth Director of the University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics.

Improving our understanding of the physical characteristics of plutonium as it ages is a vital aspect of maintaining the reliability of the U.S. nuclear deterrent in the absence of underground testing. The recent installation of a new plutonium target fabrication facility at LLNL aims to further progress toward that goal.

A research team was able to generate polarized X-rays with unprecedented purity at the European XFEL in Hamburg. The experiments involved scientists from the Helmholtz Institute Jena, a branch of GSI, Friedrich Schiller University Jena and the Helmholtz Center Dresden-Rossendorf. The method is supposed to be used in the coming years to show that even vacuum behaves like a material under certain circumstances — a prediction from quantum electrodynamics.

ECLIM2022, the 36th European Conference on Laser Interaction with Matter will be held in Frascati, Italy on 19-23 September 2022.

The ICXRL was established to promote advanced extreme UV and X-ray sources, and their application in physics, (bio-)chemistry, and materials science. Joining ICXRL means experiencing the latest trends, and shaping the future progress. Latest results on state-of-the-art X-ray Free-Electron Lasers (XFEL) as well as tabletop systems are presented. Lecturers are expected to submit a peer-reviewed paper for the SPIE monograph.

Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) is investing £60 million as part of its continued support to the particle physics research community in the UK. This funding helps to keep the UK at the forefront of answering some of the biggest and most complex questions in science and supports the next generation of UK particle physicists. The latest particle physics experiment grants from STFC will fund teams from 18 UK universities to carry out world-leading particle physics research over the next three years.

The HiLASE Centre in Dolni Brezany is celebrating another success; another world record. At the end of January, the High Energy Slab Lasers scientific team managed to break their own world record on the BIVOJ laser system by 40%! Converting to the second harmonic frequency, they demonstrated 515 nm, second harmonic pulses with an energy of 95 J at a repetition rate of 10 Hz.

Advanced Photon Technologies program will develop powerful petawatt laser systems.

Professor Giubellino will continue to lead the world-class scientific program of GSI and FAIR as Scientific Managing Director of the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung GmbH and the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research in Europe GmbH (FAIR GmbH) for the next five years. The FAIR Council and the GSI Supervisory Board, impressed by the achievements in his first term, have expressed their wish for him to serve for a second term that started on January 1, 2022.