Location and Facilities
The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) is one of the largest astronomical institutions in Europe, it hosts advanced solar and night-sky telescopes at the Observatorios de Canarias and has built one of the world´s largest optical/infrared telescopes " the GTC 10.4m ”. It’s superior academic and technical facilities in La Laguna (Tenerife, Canary Islands) make it a natural home from which to build another powerful research program that links its existing astrophysics talent with the science and engineering expertise needed to build the LIOM group.
This will create at the IAC a unique research expertise for novel telescope systems and more. Its nascent partnerships with academic physics and astronomy groups in Lyon (France) , Hawaii and Georgia (USA) , and commercial technology initiatives in Spain, USA, and Canada, means that LIOM has a robust scientific and technical foundation to expand and build from, while it is integrated into the IAC in Tenerife.
The ERA Chairs program will attract an established scientist and leader in this field who knows and is already collaborating with the IAC. It will engage a growing network of world-class academic and private-sector scientists and engineers from Europe and North America, and house them in the new, recently completed, La Laguna office and laboratory IACtec
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IACtec has committed 200 m2 of modern laboratory and office space for the LIOM enterprise. Additional high-bay/crane/clean room space (free of charge) will be available on a temporary basis for Small-ELF construction needs. The optomechanical laboratory will include vibration isolated optics tables, interferometric metrology, glass shaping equipment (gantry CO2 laser, kiln), electronics support for high voltage electronics, 3D printer support, and various optomechanical support hardware. In addition, it will include parallel NVIDIA 4xGPU (A100 or equivalent) with 2Tby memory suitable for neural network training. Ergonomic office and teleconference facilities will be integrated |
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