(Photo above was taken on the 4th December 2020. Left: The latest photo of the EPAC building. Right: an illustration of what EPAC will look like once completed.)
We are currently building the Extreme Photonics Applications Centre (EPAC) in Oxfordshire after its Ground-Breaking Ceremony back in February 2020. EPAC is a new
national facility to support UK science, technology, innovation and industry. It’s
a partnership between UKRI, MoD, academia and industry. It will bring together
world-leading interdisciplinary expertise to develop and apply novel, laser
based, non-conventional accelerators and particle sources which have unique
properties. We expect this to produce scientific breakthroughs and stimulate
new solutions to challenging problems to help advance UK science and
technology, helping to keep us safer, improve our healthcare and support
a cleaner, more productive economy.
EPAC will bring:
Discovery- Driving forward the scientific understanding of laser driven accelerators and sources.
- Explore matter in extreme environments, usually only found off planet.
- Enable experiments to simulate astrophysical events and study fundamental aspects of the universe.
Innovation- R&D for a new generation of compact, super-bright, novel accelerators.
- Advanced, multi-modal, dynamic and highly penetrating imaging capabilities
- New technologies for advanced sensing in defence and security
- Novel radiobiology for future therapeutic modalities.
Training- High quality and broad spectrum training for engineers, apprentices, PhD and early career scientists, generating a pipeline of people with expert, high quality skills.
This will be made possible by the bringing together of cross-disciplinary expertise for EPAC's planning, building, operation and exploitation.
