Extreme Light Infrastructure - Nuclear Physics (ELI-NP): Present status and perspectives

Extreme Light Infrastructure - Nuclear Physics (ELI- NP), to become operational in 2019, is a new Research Center built in Romania that will use extreme electromagnetic fields for nuclear physics research. ELI-NP will bring together two scientific communities, the lasers and nuclear physics aiming at achieving the integration of the two disciplines and creating nuclear photonics. The ELI-NP facility will combine two large equipment with state-of-the-art parameters, namely a 2×10 PW high power laser system and a very brilliant gamma beam system. The unique operational features of these scientific tools will allow approaching the following main research topics: laser driven nuclear physics experiments, characterization of the laser-target interaction by the means of nuclear physics methods, photonuclear reactions, exotic nuclear physics and astrophysics. Applications extend from the nuclear power plants to medicine and from space science to material science.