The Prague Asterix Laser System facility is conceived as a laboratory providing the basis for experimental research in the field of high-power lasers and their applications, notably in the physics of laser plasmas. The principal experimental resource at PALS is the high-power iodine laser system Asterix IV. It is capable of delivering up to 1 kJ of energy at the fundamental wavelength 1.315 µm. This energy may be split to few auxiliary beams with controlled time shift from the main beam. All beams may be frequency doubled (wavelength 657 nm) or tripled (438 nm). At a pulse of about 350 ps, the laser produces power of 3 TW. The full energy shot can be fired each 25 minutes. The laser delivers a beam with superior spatial profile quality, and exhibits high stability of the output beam energy over a sequence of shots. The system is exploited for research of interaction with matter of focused high-power laser beams of a power density of 10¹⁴-10¹⁶ W/cm² and for studies of hot laser-produced plasmas. Main effort is aimed at various applications in science and technology of the hot laser plasma products, such as radiation and charged particles. The main lines of research of the laboratory are the following:

• development and application of plasma-based point sources of non-coherent soft x-rays,
• development and application of plasma-based soft x-ray lasers,
• development and application laser plasma sources of highly-charged high-energy ions,
• study of matter in conditions of extreme pressures and temperatures, with respect to the needs of material sciences, laboratory astrophysics, thermonuclear research and other scientific fields.