European laser facility begins construction

Nature : The second of three high-energy laser facilities being built as part of the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) in Europe broke ground in Romania in June. The €356 million ($475 million) facility will use a pair of 10-petawatt titanium sapphire lasers in nuclear-physics experiments; the lasers will be nine times stronger than the current strongest lasers. The other two facilities, in Hungary and the Czech Republic, will use lasers as x-ray and UV light sources for a variety of experiments. The majority of the funding for the facilities is coming from the European Union’s structural funds budget, which normally is used for national infrastructure projects, primarily in the EU’s poorer nations. The ELI facilities have run into some difficulties in using those funds, including a two-year construction delay on the Romanian facility. And now there is concern that the construction on the facilities will not be completed by the time the funding cycle ends in 2015.