Poland's participation in the EuXFEL

The construction, maintenance and management of the European Free Electron Laser has been entrusted to the non-profit European XFEL GmbH (a company under German commercial law with limited liability) gathering international shareholders. The supervisory body of the company is the European XFEL Council. At present, the company’s members and partners in the project are: Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. The cost of building and commissioning the facility was set at more than a billion euros (€1.22 billion according to a 2005 cost estimate), of which Germany pledged 58% of the cost and Russia another 27%. The rest of the cost was covered by shares in the 1-3% range belonging to the rest of the partners, including Poland. The shareholder representing Poland is the National Center for Nuclear Research. The size of the Polish share is currently 2.13%. In recent years, there has been a sharp increase in the number of measurement hours assigned to Polish users, from about 25 hours in 2018-2021 to 116 hours in 2023. This is a very big success for Polish EuXFEL users. At the same time, there has been a large increase in the total number of available measurement hours from about 2,000 hours in 2020 to 8640 hours in 2023.