XFEL and FLASH are part of a Roadmap of the European Union

XFEL

The European XFEL facility is one of the 35 projects which form the recently published roadmap of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI). A second project is named IRUVX-FEL which is a consortium of FLASH and four FEL facilities for radiation in the infrared (IR) to soft X-ray (UVX) range which are planned in Europe.

The ESFRI Roadmap is the result of a two-year intensive consultation and peer review process involving over 1000 high-level international experts. It is the first European roadmap for new, large-scale research infrastructures and it presents projects, which are of central importance for the European research position for the next 10–20 years and which go beyond the European boarders. The project descriptions highlight how they would impact on science and technology development at international level and on new ways of pursuing science in Europe.

Furthermore the ESFRI roadmap refers to the European strategy for particle physics which was approved by the CERN Council with a special reference to the importance of the Large Hadron Collider LHC and its complement, the International Linear Collider ILC.

ESFRI was appointed by the EU in 2002 to support a coherent approach to policy-making on research infrastructures in Europe. For this, the roadmap provides a list of selected projects which will be periodically updated in future.