EUCALL’s final Annual Meeting

From 30 May to 1 June 2018, over 60 participants in the European Cluster of Advanced Laser Light Sources (EUCALL) met in Dolní Břežany, Czech Republic, for the project’s final annual meeting at ELI-Beamlines. Over the past three years, the EU-funded project (Horizon 2020 Grant Agreement No. 654220) has brought together experts from synchrotron, free-electron laser, and high-power optical laser facilities to work on common technologies and collaborate on solutions to challenges facing their fields. Since EUCALL ends on 30 September 2018, those at the meeting spent the majority of their time strategizing the last tasks and making plans for extending the collaborations initiated through the project. Elettra is one of the eleven light source facilities taking part in EUCALL.

Such a meeting was also a ripe time for reflection on the project’s successes. EUCALL Coordinator and European XFEL Scientific Director Thomas Tschentscher opened the meeting praising the efforts of those involved and going over the project’s results so far. Dozens of papers linked to EUCALL developments have been published, with at least 10 ending up in high-impact journals.
Among the most recent successes at the time of the meeting were the deployment of HIREP’s high repetition sample delivery system prototypes at ESRF and the successful use of the diverse PUCCA diagnostics and timing tools at the European XFEL’s FXE instrument. UFDAC, a work package offering firmware for ultrafast data acquisition and analysis needed to deal with high data throughput, is attracting attention with its benchmark 10 GB/s rate of processing data. The SIMEX simulation software models experiments at light sources from source to detector and has been praised by the project reviewer as being an “invaluable” tool.
In addition to plenary sessions and breakout working time for the technical groups, the meeting also featured talks on other international light source collaborations such as LEAPS and Laserlab-Europe and a presentation on www.wayforlight.eu, a database of light source facility characteristics that has been significantly expanded as a consequence of EUCALL efforts to include optical laser-driven UV/x-ray sources. The wayforlight database is operated and maintained by Elettra.
One common theme at all talks was how the different teams could continue collaborating beyond the EUCALL end date. Attendees proposed several ideas, with a scope either within their individual work packages or extending to all project partners and beyond. Some already made plans, such as a continuation of SIMEX that will be a part of a future open science cloud networking project, and a Target Network that will help facilities collaborate on challenges associated with experiments using high repetition rate high power optical lasers.
“The partners are very pleased, highlighting a wealth of advanced results coming out of the project, as well as instruments and tools that can be used at complimentary light sources participating in EUCALL”, EUCALL Coordinator Thomas Tschentscher said. “During the next weeks we will complete any remaining tasks in EUCALL and prepare for the future of our collaboration.”
A final EUCALL workshop will take place on 6 September 2018 in Brussels, Belgium, on Future Strategies for Research Infrastructure Operation.

www.eucall.eu
Joseph Piergrossi