Radioactive ion beam facilities in Europe

The past two decades have seen extraordinarily rapid development of radioactive beam physics throughout the world and in particular in Europe. The important scientific advances have stemmed from a large number of facilities. Previously existing stable beam machines have been adapted to produce rare isotope beams and dedicated facilities have come on-line. This talk gives an overview of the present European installations highlighting their complementary nature. The European roadmap calls for the construction of two next generation facilities: FAIR making use of projectile fragmentation and EURISOL based on the ISOL technique. The future FAIR facility will be described and the path towards EURISOL presented in the light of the construction of “intermediate” generation facilities SPIRAL2, HIE ISOLDE and SPES and results from the ongoing EURISOL Design Study.