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The Extreme Light Infrastructure is a Research Infrastructure of pan-European interest and part of the European ESFRI Roadmap. ELI hosts the most intense beamline system worldwide, develop new interdisciplinary research opportunities with light from these lasers and secondary radiation derived from them, and make them available to the international scientific user community. ELI aims to be the world's biggest and first international user facility in beamline and laser research.
The facility will be based on four sites. Three of them are presently being implemented in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania, with an investment volume exceeding €850 million, mostly stemming from the European Regional Development Fund. In Dolní Břežany, near Prague, Czech Republic, the ELI Beamlines facility is developing short-pulse secondary sources of radiation and particles. The ELI Attosecond Light Pulse Source in Szeged, Hungary is establishing a unique facility which provides light sources within an extremely broad frequency range in the form of ultrashort pulses with high repetition rate. In Măgurele, Romania, the ELI Nuclear Physics facility is focusing on laser-based nuclear physics. The location of ELI's fourth pillar, the highest-intensity pillar, is still to be decided. Its laser power is expected to exceed that of the current ELI pillars by about one order of magnitude.