ELI-ALPS: the ultrafast challenges in Hungary

The ELI -- Extreme Light Infrastructure -- or as it is commonly referred to: the SUPERLASER will be one of the large research facilities of the European Union. ELI will be built with a joint international effort to form an integrated infrastructure comprised of three branches. The ELI Beamline Facility (Prague, Czech Republic) will mainly focus on particle acceleration and X-ray generation, while the ELI Nuclear Physics Facility (Magurele, Romania) will be dealing with laser-based nuclear physics as well as high field physics. In the talk we introduce the ELI Attosecond Light Pulse Source (ELI-ALPS) to be built in Szeged, Hungary. The primary mission of the ELI-ALPS Research Infrastructure is to provide the international scientific community with a broad range of ultrafast light sources, especially with coherent XUV and X-ray radiation, including single attosecond pulses. Thanks to this combination of parameters never achieved before, energetic attosecond X-ray pulses of ELI-ALPS will enable recording freeze-frame images of the dynamical electronic-structural behaviour of complex atomic, molecular and condensed matter systems, with attosecond-picometer resolution. The secondary purpose is to contribute to the scientific and technological development towards generating 200 PW pulses, being the ultimate goal of the ELI project. ELI-ALPS will be operated also as a user facility and hence serve basic and applied research in physical, chemical, material and biomedical sciences as well as industrial applications. The Facility will be built by the end of 2015 from a budget exceeding 240M EUR. The building and the IT infrastructure, from high speed internal networking, remote controlled system alignment, targetry and data aquisition through laser and radiation safety tools until security systems, will challenge the state of the art of similar research facilities.