Stronger together – Visegrad closure meeting opens up new collaboration perspectives between ELI Beamlines and Solaris user facilities.

On May 29-31, a Visegrad closure meeting was held in Krakow. Scientists from all four Visegrad countries – Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Republic – met together at Solaris to discuss the results of the previous collaboration round and plans for the future. Since 2017, the collaboration members have regularly conducted coordination meetings and joint experiments with the support of the Visegrad Fund . The initial goal of setting up time-resolved X-ray spectroscopy methodologies at ELI Beamlines was later on extended towards the involvement of experts from the complementary optical spectroscopy method. This allowed to perform few successful user-assisted experiments at the corresponding end stations at ELI Beamlines (part of ELI ERIC, the Czech Republic) in 2021 and 2022, engaging the expertise of colleagues from IFJ PAN (Krakow, PL) and Wigner RCP (Budapest, HU).

The last round of the collaboration received two prolongations and lasted from 05/10/2020 till 31/05/2022. It received two extensions and resulted, inter alia, in foundation of CELIXS – Consortium around ELI for X-ray spectroscopy. The Consortium format will allow the partners to follow the initial idea to build and develop the X-ray spectroscopy end station at ELI Beamlines while extending the V4 roadmap towards involvement of new members and analysis methods. 
At the closure meeting, the participants enjoyed a tour to the Wieliczka salt mines followed by two intense days of seminars held in a hybrid mode. Thanks to this, scientists from Sweden and the Czech Republic were able to join the sessions remotely. At the final meeting discussion, a strategy of further collaboration with Solaris as a new institution joining the group has been developed. In this way, the Closure meeting opened up a new prospective for strengthening scientific connections between V4 countries as well as the two largest user facilities in the region.

The PI of the 2020/2022 round Anna Zymaková (ELI) thanks Jakub Szlachetko – Director of Scientific Affairs at Solaris – and Alicja Górkiewicz ¬– Head of Solaris User Office – for hosting the meeting at the Solaris premises and help with organization. We look forward to the future united work!

The material was created thanks to Anna Zymaková.