The European Commission has selected two projects that are coordinated by DESY for support within the EU’s Sixth Framework Programme.
The EUROFEL and EUROTeV projects were ranked first and second, respectively, in the referees’ evaluation. From 2005 on, they will receive around €9 million each, spread over a period of three years. This corresponds to approximately one-third of the total costs estimated for each project. The remaining two-thirds will be born by the participating research institutions.
The EUROFEL project, in which 16 leading research institutions from five European countries are participating together with DESY, is a design study with the goal of developing jointly the physics and technology needed for the next generation of short-wave radiation sources, the free-electron lasers. Seven such facilities are currently being planned in Europe – in France, Germany, Italy, Sweden and the UK. Although the individual free-electron laser proposals partly differ in their choice of technology, they all share important issues such as the extremely high requirements concerning the quality of the electron beam, or the concepts of radiation generation. These are the issues on which the joint coordinated activities of the 16 participating research teams will concentrate.
The second project that was selected for support – EUROTeV – was proposed by 27 institutes from six European countries, among them DESY as the coordinating institution and CERN. This project’s goal is to focus European research and development activities for the design of an international linear collider for particle physics, and to perform final-phase research and development work on essential components for the facility – in close agreement with the corresponding Asian and American committees.
There is worldwide consensus that such a linear collider is to be the next major accelerator for particle physics. One motive of the EUROTeV proposal is to develop a high-quality European structure that would later evolve into the European branch of the international planning group for a global linear-collider project.
