General description

1. Project relevance/context

Contex/problem

The aim of this project is to create the fundamentals of easy and straight-forward access to femtosecond hard X-ray spectroscopy for V4 scientists. This scientific technique is recently under extremely fast development and is widely used by scientist from different research fields like physics, chemistry and biology, however being limited only to the use of central facilities in USA and Japan. Therefore, the use of such facilities is restricted for the V4 scientists by the high costs of travel and experiments’ implementation and thus limiting fast development of frontier science in V4 countries. Moreover, the lack of newest scientific tools at closely located laboratories makes professional career boundaries for young V4 researchers aiming to take part into the modern sciences.

Solution

We have established international cooperation that includes scientists from all V4 countries whom expertise ensures successful project completion. Main goal of the group is to build ready-to-use scientific instrument to detect ultra-fast chemical/physical/biological processes and implement it at Extreme Light Infrastructure facility in Prague. Thanks to this, local scientists will gain access to frontier research at closely located laboratory. Moreover, the group will popularize the technique within the V4 scientific community and provide support for young scientists that will lead to increased number of groundbreaking discoveries in the future. Within the present grant application we ask to support our efforts, by funding three executive meetings for V4 partners involved in the project.

Regional relevance

– the expertise from scientist representing different fields is needed; therefore 6 institutes from 4 Visegrad countries are involved. – the scientific community of V4 countries will receive the access to modern and up-to-date scientific instrument that will be available next-door and on daily basis. – we aim at establishintg long term and deep-rooted collaboration going beyond the time frame of the present project and involving V4 scientists working in diverse scientific fields like physics, chemistry and biology. – young scientists from V4 countries will receive the support in performing frontier science. – the technical development of the project may be adapted in the future at different facilities worldwide and thus being recognized as V4 scientific development.

2. Target groups

Target groups/ stakeholders Target group specification Value
V4 scientists researchers working in the field of biology, chemistry and physics 5000
Project partners: Jan Kochanowski University (Kielce, Poland), Wigner Research Centre for Physics (Budapest, Hungary), Institute of Physical Chemistry PAS (Warsaw, Poland), IFJ PAN (Krakow, Poland), Extreme Light Infrastructure (Prague, Czech Republic), Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice (Kosice, Slovakia) specialists working in the field of ultra-fast and x-ray sciences 12
Master and PhDs students young researchers 1000
Broad public - advertisements at public events (like Researchers' Night) and press releases in national and regional media broad public 100000

3. Project objectives

Main project objective

The aim of this project is to develop and demonstrate a novel X-ray spectroscopic tool to detect and visualize ultra-fast processes in matter at Extreme Light Infrastructure facility, Prague, Czech Republic. The developed instrument will serve for V4 scientists working in the field of biology, chemistry and physics.

Specific project outcomes

Project events:

Event 1 Kick-off meeting - Krakow
March 2017
4 days meeting: Discussion on project goals and milestones. The first workshop aims at definitions of work sharing of each partner, preparation of detailed program for instrument development and definition of the goals that are necessary for successful project execution.
Event 2 Executive meeting and experiment - Prague
October 2017
10 days meeting: Experiment execution. The second meeting aims at experiment execution at ELI facility, Prague. During the experiment we will validate the instrumental approach to measure X-ray absorption spectra using broad-band mode X-ray source generated at ELI. We will also perform time-resolved measurements on Fe-based benchmark systems in order to evaluate setup performances.
Event 3 Summary meeting - Budapest
December 2017
4 days meeting: Results discussion and data analysis. The third meeting will be focused on results discussion, data analysis and initial preparation of manuscripts for scientific journals.