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The European Concerted Research Action COST P14

LASER-MATTER INTERACTIONS WITH ULTRA-SHORT PULSES, HIGH-FREQUENCY PULSES AND ULTRA-INTENSE PULSES: From Attophysics to Petawatt Physics

Short cuts:

What is COST P14?

The Concerted Action COST P14 brings together a large number of European research groups studying the interaction of atoms, molecules, clusters, solids or plasmas with high-intensity coherent light. Its main objective is to develop a greater understanding of various fundamental physical processes and their applications, ranging from ultra-fast phenomena on the attosecond scale to ultra-strong interactions of matter with petawatt pulses. COST P14 aims at facilitating the co-ordination of European research on high-intensity laser-matter interaction and at developing a fruitful collaboration between the European Atomic Physics and Plasma Physics communities. In particular, it aims at building up further links between the participating teams and creating larger scale collaborations, at broadening the training of young scientists within these teams, and at facilitating the development in East European countries of research centres working on the laser-matter interaction in strong fields.

The action has started on the 14th of June 2004 and will close on the 13th of June 2008.

Through the Action, COST can support the organisation of scientific meetings in relevant areas, the participation to these meetings of invited speakers, and short visits to other laboratories (“short-term scientific missions”).

What is COST?

COST is an intergovernmental framework for European Co-operation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research. Much information about COST can be found on their web site.

COST does not fund research projects directly. Instead, COST supports the co-operation of nationally-funded research activities. In this framework, COST can support short term exchanges between participating laboratories, the organisation of meetings, summer schools, workshops and conferences, and the publication of the results of the actions.

Scientific Programme

The Scientific Programme of the COST P14 is defined by the Technical Annex of the Memorandum of Understanding signed by the participating countries. It based on two mutually interlocking Working Groups. Working Group 1 investigates the interaction of ultra-short pulses, high-frequency pulses and ultra-intense pulses with atoms, molecules and clusters, i.e. the Physics of high-intensity laser-matter interactions at the microscopic level. Working Group 2 investigates the problem at the macroscopic level, i.e. the interaction of ultra-short pulses, high-frequency pulses and ultra-intense pulses with solids and plasmas.

The two working groups carry out a broad programme of research, both theoretical and experimental. The programme is divided into four Projects:

Project 1: Study of the interaction of atoms, molecules and clusters with super-intense laser pulses and few cycle laser pulses, infrared or visible, and generation of attosecond pulses.

Project 2: Study of the interaction of atoms, molecules and clusters with high-frequency radiation including attosecond pulses and pulses from free-electron lasers and X-ray lasers.

Project 3: Study of the interaction of ultra-short pulses, high-frequency pulses and ultra-intense pulses with plasmas.

Project 4: Applications of laser-plasma studies to particle acceleration, laboratory astrophysics, laser-induced nuclear reactions and the fast ignition approach to inertial confinement fusion.

Participating Countries

The countries participating to the Action (the “signatory countries”) currently are: Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, The Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United Kingdom.The deadline has now passed for other countries to join P14 without prior approval. Countries from the following list may still join subject to approval: Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Latvia, Luxembourg, Malta, Norway, Slovakia, Slovenia, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Individual institutions from these and other countries may also join COST Actions, subject to approval by the Action’s Management Committee, COST’s Technical Committee, and COST’s Committee of Senior Officials.

Participating Research Groups from Non-COST countries

The following research institutes are approved participants to the Action:

  • The University of Rochester (USA)
  • Osaka University (Japan)
  • The Multicharged Ions Spectra Data Centre of VNIFTRI (Russia)
  • The Institute of Mathematical Modelling (Russia)
  • The Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (Russia)
  • The Institute of Physics of Daghestan (Russia)
  • The Prokhorov General Physics Institute (Russia)
  • The P.N. Lebedev Physical Institute (Russia)
  • The Laser Research Institute (St Petersburg State University) (Russia)
  • The Institute for Laser Physics (Russia)
  • The Frantsevich Institute for Problems of Materials Science of NASU (Ukraine)

How to join COST P14?

If your research group is located in one of the signatory countries, please contact the Chair of the Action (please see details below under Core Management Committee) and inform your country’s representatives to the Management Committee of the action. (It is preferable to discuss this matter with one of your country’s representatives before contacting the Chair.)

If your research group is not in one of the signatory countries, please see relevant information on the web site of COST. Then contact both the Chair and the Vice Chair of the Action.

Management Committee

The Action is managed by an international Management Committee formed by representatives of the signatory countries. Each country has only one vote in the decisions taken by the Management Committee but can nominate up to two representatives (who may themselves have substitutes). The representatives have the responsibility of supervising and co-ordinating the implementation of the action and of ensuring scientific co-ordination at a national level. The Management Committee meets as often as required to dispatch its duties (typically a couple of times each year).

At their first meeting, the Management Committee decided that the day to day management of the Action would be delegated to a smaller Core Management Committee.

Please follow this link for information for members of the Management Committee.

Core Management Committee

The Core Management Committee of COST P14 is currently formed by the Chair of the Action, the Vice Chair, four Project Leaders appointed by the Management Committee, and another member of the Management Committee. The main responsibility of the Core Committee is to approve the proposals for short scientific missions put forward by the participants to the Action. The Core Committee also prepares the grounds for workshops and conferences. The Project Leaders report to the Management Committee on the progress of their project. They may also lead in the organisation of workshops. The members of the Core Management Committee currently are:

Professor Charles Joachain (Chair of COST P14)
Université Libre de Bruxelles
Physique Théorique
Campus Plaine, C.P. 227
Boulevard du Triomphe
B-1050 Bruxelles, Belgium
Tel: +32-2-650 55 78
Fax: +32-2-650 50 98
E-mail : [email protected]

Professor Dimitri Batani (Vice Chair of COST P14)
Dipartemento di Fisica dell’Università di Milano Bicocca
Piazza della Scienza 3
IT-20126 Milano, Italy
Tel: +39 02 6448 2313
Fax: +39 02 6448 2585
E-mail: [email protected]

Professor Alfred Maquet (Project Leader for Project 1)
Laboratoire de Chimie Physique-Matière et Rayonnement
Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris VI)
11, rue Pierre et Marie Curie
FR-75231 Paris Cedex 05, France
Tel: +33 01 44 27 62 77
Fax: +33 01 44 27 62 26
E-mail : [email protected]

Professor Ken Taylor (Project Leader for Project 2)
Queen’s University of Belfast
DAMTP
David Bates Building
BT7 1NN Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK
Tel: +44 (0)28 90 975049
Fax: +44 (0)28 90 239182
E-mail: [email protected]

Dr Pascal Monot (Project Leader for Project 3)
CEA- Saclay
DSM/DRECAM/SPAM
Bâtiment 522 – pièce 141
Groupe de Physique à Haute Intensité (PHI)
FR- 91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, France
Tel: +33 01 69 08 10 35 (21 13)
Fax: +33 01 69 08 12 13
E-mail: [email protected]

Professor Jürgen Meyer-ter-Vehn (Project Leader for Project 4)
Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik
Hans-Kopfermann-Str. 1
D-85748 Garching, Germany
Tel: +49 89 32905 139
Fax: +49 89 32905 200
E-mail: [email protected]

Dr Robert Potvliege
Durham University
South Road
Durham DH1 3LE, UK
Tel: +44 191 334 3698
Fax: +44 191 334 5823
E-mail: [email protected]

Short-Term Scientific Missions

Under this heading, COST can support short visits (from 1 week to 3 months) from participating laboratory to participating laboratory. The visit should aim at fostering collaboration, at learning a new technique or at making measurements using intruments of methods not available in the applicant’s own institution. This programme is particularly intended for young scientists. Grants are normally limited to travel and subsistence and do not normally exceed 2,500 euros. (For the missions supported by the Action, the limit is normally 1,000 euros in 2006 and 1,500 euros in 2007.) Payment is made after the visit and is subject to completion of a scientific report within a month after the stay. An advance payment may be made under exceptional circumstances.The host laboratory and the applicant’s laboratory must be located in different countries. The applicant’s laboratory must be located in one of the signatory countries. Visits to a laboratory not officially participating to the Action but located in another signatory country are normally permissible if justified. Visits to a participating laboratory located in a non-signatory country are also permissible.

More information can be found in the attached guide, which is correct as of September 2006. It is recommended that applicants and hosts obtain up-to-date versions of the guidelines and of the forms from the web site of the COST Office.

All applications for a short-term scientific mission should be sent by e-mail to the Chair of the Action and to ALL the other members of the Core Management Committee (see details above), with copies to the COST Scientific Officer ([email protected]) and the COST Secretary ([email protected]) in charge of the Action.

The attention of the applicants is attracted to the following points:

  • Applications should be made well in advance, as they must be approved and transmitted by the Core Management Committee to the COST Office not less than a month before the visit takes place.
  • Once approved by the COST Office, the amount of grant can no longer be changed.
  • The scientific report must be approved by the Chair of the Action before the grant can be paid.

The details of the STSM funded by COST P14 can be found here.

In view of severe budgetary constraints on the number of STSMs that the Action can support, groups interested in proposing a new mission should contact the Chair of the Action or another member of the Core Management Committee before investing time in preparing a proposal.

COST Meetings

Past meetings sponsored by COST P14:

  • VUV-FEL User Experiments Workshop at DESY, 23-25 August 2004, Hamburg, Germany.
  • VUV-FEL Ionization Experiments Workshop, 18 October 2004, Garching, Germany.
  • COST-Rutherford Workshop, 15-17 December 2004, Abingdon, UK.
  • International Workshop on “Physics of High Energy Density in Matter”, 30 January – 4 February 2005, Hirschegg, Austria.
  • International Workshop on “Fast Ignition in Fusion Targets”, June 28 – July 1 2005, Tarragona, Spain.
  • International Conference on “Superstrong Fields in Plasmas”, 19-24 September 2005, Varenna, Italy.
  • 43rd course of the International School of Quantum Electronics “Matter in Super-Intense Laser Fields”, 27 June – 5 July 2006, Erice, Italy.
  • IAMPI2006 (International Conference on the Interaction of Atoms, Molecules and Plasmas with Intense Ultrashort Laser Pulses), 1-5 October 2006, Szeged, Hungary.
  • Dream Beams Symposium, 26-28 February 2007, Garching, Germany.
  • Direct Drive and Fast Ignition Physics, 2-4 April 2007, Madrid, Spain.
  • ECAMP IX (9th European Conference on Atoms, Molecules and Photons), 6-11 May 2007, Crete, Greece.
  • International Workshop on Warm Dense Matter, 13-16 June 2007, Porquerolle, France.
  • ISUILS6 (6th International Symposium on Ultrafast Intense Laser Science), 23-27 September 2007, Tirrenia, Italy.
  • ULIS 2007 (1st International Conference on Ultra-intense Laser Interaction Sciences), 1-5 October 2007, Bordeaux, France.

Forthcoming meetings sponsored by COST P14: To be announced shortly.Conference organisers interested in obtaining financial support from COST P14 should contact the Chair of the Action.

It is not the policy of COST to reimburse the travel expenses of all participants in a COST-sponsored conference of workshop. The reimbursement of participants from non-COST countries is normally limited to four invited keynote speakers and session chairs. Participants to COST-sponsored activities interested in obtaining financial support from COST P14 should contact the organisers for further information.

Under the COST “Near Neighbours” scheme support may be given to participants from the following countries: Bosnia-Herzegovina, Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Russian Federation, Ukraine, Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Lebanon, Tunisia, Syria, Morocco and the Palestinian Authority. Support is limited to one participant per country, and is available on a first come first serve basis. Please contact the Chair or Vice Chair of the Action for further information.

History of COST P14

This Action has grown out of a number of separate threads. Fruitful collaborations between several of the research teams have been developed during the last decade in the course of successive EC Framework programmes. There is also an important link with the COST Action P2 (1997 – 2001). The Project 9 of that Action, entitled “High harmonics and XUV generation on atoms and solids through the interaction with intense laser radiation” provided a basis for establishing the “ATTO” Network within th Fifth EC Framework Programme, and paved the way for the research on attophysics to be carried out in Project 2 of the present Action. The majority of the research teams participating to it have been collaborated since 1999 within the ESF-PESC “FEMTO” programme, which came to an end in 2003. The proposal for COST P14 was put together by a small team led by Charles Joachain and was approved by the Committee of COST Senior Officials on the 4th of December 2003. The Action entered into force on the 20th of February 2004. The first meeting of the Management Committee, which marked its effective start, took place in Brussels on the 14th of June 2004.

Journal of the European Optical Society: Rapid Publications

The new Journal of the European Optical Society: Rapid Publications might be of interest to the participants to the Action. This is a fully open access, peer-reviewed electronic journal, which publishes articles in a wide range of subjects in Optics and Photonics.