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Magurele Physics Campus Honoured with EPS Historic Site Distinction

By . Published on 18 December 2017 in:
Awards, December 2017, News, , , , ,

On 15th of November 2017 a plaque declaring the Magurele Physics Campus as an EPS historic site was unveiled by the EPS President, Rüdiger Voss. The EPS Secretary General, David Lee, participated in the ceremony, together with representatives of local authorities, the Romanian Ministry of Research, the Romanian Academy, and the Research Institutes from Magurele.

Talk by EPS president Rüdiger Voss
Talk by EPS president Rüdiger Voss

Built in 1949, the Magurele Physics Campus, Bucharest, Romania, was meant to concentrate the physics research in Romania and placed Romanian research in physics within the well-recognised European expertise in the field. Benefiting from top-level equipment and laboratories, generations of researchers have over the years achieved  results and performances acknowledged by the international scientific community.

At the same time, Magurele is the place where many generations of researchers were educated and a very strong School of Physics was established.

Since its first years, Magurele was among the front runners in the former Eastern countries with some of the most advanced equipment at the time:

1956 – First Romanian electronic computer (CIFA-1); 1957 – VVR-S research reactor and U-120 cyclotron; 1960 –First Romanian Betatron; 1962 – First Romanian He-Ne infrared laser (fourth in the world); 1974 – FN Tandem Accelerator from HVEC, Radio-isotope Production Centre, Nuclear Waste Processing Centre.

Talk by EPS president Rüdiger Voss
Unveiling the plaque: Victor Zamfir and Rüdiger Voss

With more than 20% of the national scientific output, physics research in Magurele succeeded in the last 10-15 years in strengthening the existing research directions and in developing new ones, while building a new modern infrastructure included in the European network of open users facilities:

2000 – Multipurpose Irradiation Facility; 2001 – EC Centre of Excellence IDRANAP (Inter-Disciplinary Research and Applications Based on Nuclear and Atomic Physics); 2002 – First GRID application in Romania; 2012 – Tandetrons (1 MV and 3 MV) for applied physics, TR19 variable energy cyclotron.

With more than 3,000 people involved in physics research, Magurele’s scientific community has become a real partner in the European Research Area, successfully collaborating with and within Large Scale Facilities worldwide and providing scientific and technical expertise in the field.

The contribution of Magurele in strengthening European research has reached a new dimension by constructing the Extreme Light Infrastructure – Nuclear Physics (ELI-NP) Centre – part of the pan-European ELI project, the most advanced research facility in the world focusing on the study of photonuclear physics and its applications. ELI-NP will be among the front-runners of the new physics generated by the interaction of high-power laser beams with matter.

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