20 Jun 2025

ELI’s Expanding User Community Showcasing Scientific Results at the User Meeting 2025

The annual ELI User Meeting, held from 18–20 June 2025 in Szeged, welcomed nearly 200 participants from across the ELI user community, representing a broad spectrum of scientific fields.

Over two and a half days, researchers presented results from recent user campaigns, exchanged ideas, and explored future collaborations. The event showcased ELI’s growing scientific capabilities and provided a space for open dialogue between users and facility teams on access, instrumentation, and technical developments.

The programme featured 16 scientific sessions chaired by leading experts, and a series of thematic workshops that addressed current challenges and opportunities in high-intensity laser science, ranging from machine learning and AI in experimental environments to radiobiology, advanced targetry, diagnostics, and strong-field physics. A poster session added to the exchange of ideas, featuring 34 scientific posters and 11 contributions from ELI’s facility teams on instrumentation and experimental platforms.

“ELI is more than a facility; it’s a growing community shaped by its users,” says Allen Weeks, ELI Director General. “The breadth of science and level of engagement we see here confirms that ELI is becoming a global hub for high-intensity laser research.”

The presentations not only highlighted the scientific outcomes of the user experiments performed but how users’ activities are actively contributing to the development of the infrastructure. Since the launch of the Joint ELI User Programme, the user community has grown significantly in both scale and in engagement. Across the 6 open calls, ELI has received 563 proposals involving 1400 researchers from 38 countries. The growing participation and depth of evidence of an active, evolving user base that recognised ELI not simply as a service provider, but as a long-term scientific partner. A dedicated session at the meeting focused on how to structure exchanges and improve feedback mechanisms to better support the needs of the user base. ELI is committed to ensuring that researchers are not only accessing world-class technology, but also becoming part of a sustained, collaborative research ecosystem.

Alessandra Bellissimo, a solid-state physicist at TU Vienna and a repeat user at the ELI ALPS NanoESCA station, spoke to this point. “These meetings give us access not just to facilities, but to the people behind them — the experts, the peers, the community. That’s just as important as the lasers,” she said. She first participated in 2021, and her involvement has grown into a series of successful experiments and continuing collaborations.

The meeting also featured a keynote by Katalin Hideghéthy, Head of Biomedical Applications at ELI ALPS, who presented pioneering work on laser-driven radiation sources for cancer research. Her team’s experiments have bridged the gap between biomedical science and laser physics, using complementary techniques across ELI. “Laser-driven approaches could be transformative in radiotherapy and improve outcomes impacting millions of lives,” said Hideghéthy.”

Several satellite meetings, complementing the scientific programme, offered opportunities for institutional stakeholders to engage. A session on the Swiss-funds initiative invited Swiss researchers to explore future cooperation, supported by dedicated funding streams for ELI projects in all three host countries. The X-lites network, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, brought a delegation of scientists from US institutions to explore synergies between high-intensity light source facilities worldwide. In addition, a new cooperation agreement with the Cockcroft Institute aims to advance research in laser-driven electron beam physics and includes joint activities such as PhD fellowships and researcher exchanges. These institutional engagements underline ELI’s strategic relevance and global partnerships.

The event concluded with the awarding of three poster prizes. Parnia Bastani Elahabadi received the Young Scientist Award for the poster on “Using nanostructured dielectric surfaces for the generation of nano-focused XUV radiation”, Smrithan Ravichandran was recognised for the Most Innovative Idea for the poster “Exploiting petawatt pulses to prepare electron-free focal volumes”, and Balázs Farkas was awarded Best ELI-Related Topic for the poster titled “Attosecond metrology of vacuum-ultraviolet high-order harmonics generated in semiconductors via laser-dressed photoionization of alkali metals”

The 2025 ELI User Meeting reaffirmed ELI’s central mission: to provide open, user-driven access to world-class laser facilities, while actively supporting a collaborative scientific community. With the seventh User Call launching in September and the next User Meeting planned for summer 2026 in Prague, ELI is continuing to grow as both a platform for research and a home for the international laser science community.