Outline of the ELI-Beamlines facility

ELI-Beamlines will be a high-energy, repetition-rate laser pillar of the ELI (Extreme Light Infrastructure) project. It will be an international facility for both academic and applied research, slated to provide user capability since the beginning of 2016. The main objective of the ELI-Beamlines Project is delivery of ultra-short high-energy pulses for the generation and applications of high-brightness X-ray sources and accelerated particles. The laser system will be delivering pulses with length ranging between 10 and 150 fs and will provide high-energy petawatt and 10-PW peak powers. For high-field physics experiments it will be able to provide focused intensities attaining 10 24 Wcm -2 , while this value can be upgraded in a later phase without the need to upgrade the building infrastructure. In this paper we describe the overall conception and layout of the designed ELI-Beamlines facility, and review some essential elements of the design.