Motivation

Interest on crystal growth and characterization at the Department of Physics, West University of Timisoara (WUT) began 40 years ago, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Mircea Zaganescu. The Crystal growth laboratory is part of the Physics Department of the West University of Timisoara. The main goal has been to design set-ups and elaborate technology to obtain and to characterize the crystals. During the time attention was focused on several objectives: to obtain various type of crystals, to characterize their physical properties and to use numerical simulation methods in order to optimize the crystals quality, and the set-ups details. Two crystal growth methods were especially developed: the vertical Bridgman technique (for fluorides) and the Edge-defined Film-fed Growth method in order to obtain shaped crystals (sapphire and fluorides). During the time over 75 ISI papers were published in the field of crystal growth.

In the past years the team of the Crystal Growth Laboratory, West University of Timisoara (WUT) had gained a significant experience in the field of growing and characterization of silicon and rare earth doped fluoride crystals. WUT has already shown his interest to take contact with the research activities at ELI: WUT is member of the ELI Academic Forum and in the last 2 years, researchers from ELI have taught ELI-research related courses to the master students from WUT.

The participation of the WUT in the ELI collaboration will have a significant impact on the organization research in the field of crystal growth mainly at two levels:

  • at the fundamental research level - the studies of material behavior in extreme environments (which is a central topic in the ELI-NP proposed experiments), will give a fundamental understanding of the radiation induced damage in crystals, taking advantage of the specific properties of laser driven radiation production, such as ultrashort time scale when the radiation is generated and the relatively broadband spectrum of radiation, complementary to the traditional nuclear physics research laboratories. Besides these, numerical computations of the interaction of high intensity lasers with matter is pertinent for further improvement of analytical tools with the aim to reduce costs of future experiments and to provide a useful comparative tool for the next generation of high intensity laser experimental investigations. The importance of using numerical tools is emphasized in the section (5.2.7) concerning the Modelling of High-Intensity Laser Interaction with Matter within the ELI-NP White Book.
  • At the applied research level – the experiments performed under high energy irradiation processes could be very helpful to evaluate the applications potential of the grown crystals and for the design of other classes of materials, more resistant when working in extreme conditions.