Title: Taking high-energy lasers to the next level in THRILL – a joint European effort
Speakers: Zsuzsanna Major, Bernhard Zielbauer and Yannik Zobus  (GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung, Darmstadt, Germany)
Date: Wednesday, 09 December 2026, 16:00 Central European Time (CET)

State-of-the-art high-energy (kJ-class) lasers are used as the main drivers in many different areas of research, such as the investigation of shock-driven warm-dense matter, dynamic compression of materials, laboratory astrophysics, or more recently, laser-driven fusion. However, one of their most important limitations is the low repetition rate of a few shots per day. The EU-funded THRILL project (Technology for High-Repetition-Rate Intense Laser Laboratories) has identified the technological bottlenecks of such high-energy lasers with the goal to overcome them and lead to the next generation of high-energy laser systems, in particular to be used in combination with the large-scale European research facilities Eu-XFEL and FAIR.

 With the THRILL project nearing its end, we will present some of the key achievements within the project, with the emphasis on the contribution of GSI. After a general review of the project and the consortium given by Zsuzsanna Major, the progress in actively cooled high-energy laser amplification will be presented by Bernhard Zielbauer. Yannik Zobus will present the OPOSSUM (OPen-source Optics Simulation System and Unified Modeler) simulation framework developed in THRILL, which allows for a holistic description of high-energy laser systems and will discuss the prospects of this framework beyond the THRILL project.