Mini-workshop at the IFIN-HH and ELI-NP in Bucharest-Magurele
The 74th board meeting of the Nuclear Physics Division (NPD) of the European Physical Society (EPS) was held on 23-24 October 2017 at the Horia Hulubei National Institute of Physics and Nuclear Engineering (IFIN–HH) and Extreme Light Infrastructure – Nuclear Physics (ELI-NP) in Bucharest- Magurele.
Before this meeting, a half-day mini-workshop was jointly organised by IFIN-HH and ELI-NP. IFIN-HH is an historical and glorious research Institute founded more than 60 years ago, while ELI-NP was established only recently close by IFIN-HH as one of the major European Research Infrastructures within the ESFRI roadmap.
Prof. N.V. Zamfir, Director of both Institutions, opened the workshop with an overview talk on the status and the future of nuclear physics facilities in Romania. The overall manpower working in the Magurele campus in nuclear physics is about one thousand. The annual budget of IFIN-HH is about 35 MEuro, while for the implementation of ELI-NP an additional budget of 310 MEuro was assigned for the period 2013-2018. The scientific output is impressive since the nearly 700 peer-reviewed publications per year represent about 10% of the overall publications from Romania in all scientific research fields.
IFIN-HH hosts 3 different TANDEM accelerators of 9MV, 3MV and 1MV for basic and applied research in nuclear and atomic physics. Dr N. Marginean, head of the Nuclear Physics Department and president of IFIN-HH Scientific Council, illustrated these activities and in particular the ROSPHERE detector array that is composed of 15 HPGe detectors with AntiCompton shields and 20 LaBr3(Ce) detectors for gamma-ray spectroscopy. About 20 different experiments are carried out each year with a strong foreign participation.
Dr M. Petrovici, head of the Hadron Physics Department, presented the department with its large involvement in European collaborations such as CHIMERA@LNS, FOPI@GSI, ALICE@CERN and the future project CBM@FAIR. The department has impressive capabilities to make significant technical contributions to many detector projects. The computer centre capacity, which provides almost 6% of the total ALICE Tier-2 CPUs, is also outstanding.
Dr M. Dragusin, president of the Romanian Physical Society, presented an overview of the Research, Development and Innovations in Applied Physics at IFIN–HH. He also presented the activities and role of the Romanian Physical Society.
Finally, Dr D. Stutman, head of the Group Experiments with Laser beams, and Dr D. Balabanski, head of the Group Experiments with Gamma beams, presented the actual status of implementation and the perspectives with high power lasers and gamma beams at ELI-NP for commissioning and future nuclear physics experiments. ELI-NP, only a few years after its approval by the European Competitiveness Council in 2009 and the beginning of funding in 2013, is very close to the start of its experimental activity. Civil construction is completed and the buildings will host 2 high power lasers (up to 10 PW each) and a high intensity monochromatic gamma-beam (up to 20 MeV) with 8 experimental areas. Many Laboratories around Europe have been contributing to the research program and are presently very active in the preparation of the experimental campaigns to come.
The workshop was completed by a visit to some of the research facilities in operation and the ones in advanced state of implementation. After the successful workshop and the impressive visit, the Nuclear Physics Board strongly reinforced its opinion that IFIN-HH is a major research infrastructure in Europe and it could get a feeling of how much ELI-NP will represent one of the future pillars of research in nuclear physics and applications in the next decade in Europe.
The whole mini-workshop program can be found here.
