Periodic Reporting for period 1 - EURO-LABS (EUROpean Laboratories for Accelerator Based Science)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2022-09-01 al 2023-08-31
EUROpean Laboratories for Accelerator Based Sciences (EURO-LABS) brings together for the first time the high and low-energy communities. It serves as the inaugural effort to enhance communication and synergies between these communities and build a super community of European researchers and technical staff to address various current challenges and build the foundation for world leading endeavours, thereby injecting vitality into the field of science and enrich its links to society. Its primary aim is to facilitate streamlined access to both existing and emerging state-of-the-art Research Infrastructures (RIs) across Europe, and allow a diverse community of users to conduct high-impact research addressing challenges in both physics and technology. EURO-LABS promotes knowledge sharing across scientific domains and contributes to the advancement of scientific and technical frontier knowledge in Europe. To boost the competitiveness of European RIs, a coordinating board was established to plan and implement training programs. In addition to lectures, each training school will provide hands-on-training in accelerator-based science and will be hosted at specific RIs, capitalizing on their unique strengths and capabilities. They are categorized into basic and advanced schools for researchers, and also a school dedicated to technical staff. Another important endeavour is to enhance data accessibility within the project, adhering to the FAIR principles. Open science presents a new opportunity for the nuclear physics community to improve the management and use of the extensive datasets produced throughout Europe, a practice already well established in the high-energy physics community. This initiative will stimulate new collaborations and integrate the nuclear physics community into the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) framework.
The progress in the various work packages of the project is going on schedule as planned. All the due milestone and deliverables were completed on time. Regarding transnational access to the participating RIs, the various User Selection Panels (USP) have been established, mandated to oversee the distribution of the access funds in all the 47 facilities and RIs of the project. Calls for beam time at the various facilities were advertised by the individual facilities, and through the EURO-LABS website, which also provides detailed information on the procedure for availing the modalities of Trans-national Access (TA) or Virtual Access (VA) support. In the selection process efforts have been made to encourage and promote younger and new users and those with limited abilities. Overall, the TA is proceeding on plan, with a large number of projects completed and access beam hours delivered. As expected, at this start-up period we observed variations in the delivery profile of access between facilities. Some surpassed the rough initial year’s projection (~25% access units), with overbooking. There were isolated cases where the access delivered so far was below the projection, primarily due to delays in ongoing known upgrades or other technical reasons. These variations are expected to smooth out nevertheless and the SC is monitoring the situation and will take corrective measures if required. The number of female users was 26% with a lower average age than the male users. The service improvements proposed to elevate the quality of offered services at various RIs are progressing as planned. These improvements are expected to be completed within the next two years and be used within the duration of the project. Most of the recruitment positions has been successfully accomplished. Virtual access to the new Theo4Exp infrastructure is ahead of schedule.