Project Description

Complete design and build of Mechanical and Electrical services to Extreme Photonics Applications Centre (EPAC), located at Harwell Campus. The client, Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) is a UK government body that carries out research in science and engineering, and funds UK research in areas including particle physics, nuclear physics, space science and astronomy.

EPAC will house super-bright lasers that can produce state-of-the-art high-contrast 3D images of the internal structure of complex objects from aircraft wings to bones. The laser testing process will achieve temperatures of 50 million degrees Celsius, hotter than the centre of the sun. A single flash from the laser is a quadrillion (10¹⁵) watts, which makes it 10,000 times more powerful than the whole of the UK national grid output.

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. Expected 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.​​​