In the laboratories of the Institute

Science is a collective endeavor

The 65th birthday of Head of the YUMO Group of DNICM FLNP Alexander Ivanovich Kuklin has been recently celebrated. After having graduated from the Physics Department of Moscow State University, he joined FLNP and has been working in the Laboratory for more than half of his life. Yet, he tells us not about himself but about the YUMO facility, his colleagues and his investigations.

The beginning

- The YUMO spectrometer (named in honor of Yu.M.Ostanevich in the 1990s) at the basic facility (first, the IBR-30 and later, the IBR-2 reactor) was not the very first small-angle instrument in the world but in a sense, it was still the first," Alexander Ivanovich began his story. "It was the first to use the time-of-flight technique that allows a two-megawatt reactor to obtain results comparable to those of 20-30-megawatt neutron sources. In terms of a number of parameters, the YUMO is comparable to the facilities of the Laue-Langevin Institute (France).

Laszlo Cser's last visit to Dubna

Good scientists, first of all Yuri Mechislavovich Ostanevich, Laszlo Czer (Hungary), Josef Plesztil (Czechoslovakia) and Alexander Kunchenko stood at the origins of our small-angle instrument, first - at IBR-30 and later - at IBR-2. They developed the methodology and the applicability of the small-angle neutron scattering technique. The technique is common for instruments in Russia and abroad but there are practically no facilities of such kind in Russia and in neighboring countries. It is interesting how condensed matter physics started in general and how these investigations were united with nuclear neutron physics. It is known that Ilya Mikhailovich Frank's brother Gleb Mikhailovich was a biologist. Ilya Mikhailovich very much wanted biological topics to be developed at FLNP. And condensed matter physics at FLNP started with the papers on biological topics performed by Y.M.Ostanevich and L.Czer with colleagues from Hungary. Afterwards, a great contribution was made by Josef Plesztil that dealt with polymer topics. In the late 1980s, the papers of L.S.Yaguzhinsky (Moscow State University), A.M.Balagurov and V.I.Gordelia were published. Before the famous events, we had many contacts with the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland. Foreigners always worked in the group, sometimes, their number exceeded one third of all employees.

Yu.M.Ostanevich discusses the article with A.B.Kunchenko and D.Svetogorsky

It does not happen that one person determines the development of a research area, it is often the contribution of many people. For example, Prof. Lev Yaguzhinsky, a biochemist whose 90th anniversary has recently been celebrated, has done a lot for the development of our facility - in terms of methodology and bringing the biological area to research. Lev Yaguzhinsky helped in the aspect that is difficult for physicists to understand, such joint work is very productive. He often repeats: I am always happy with the joy that comes from doing science.

Probably, our most outstanding colleague is Valentin Gordelij. He has done a lot for the laboratory, for our facility and for us personally. He supported us in difficult times and thanks to him, some of us stayed to work at FLNP.

"Passionate personality," Akhmed Islamov that has designed the facility for many years and was responsible for it together with A. I. Kuklin, joins the conversation. "Vadim Cherezov was his student. L.S.Yaguzhinsky is an outstanding personality, he has prepared more than 50 candidates of sciences. At the age of 90, he has the soul and enthusiasm of a young man, he always talks about joy and love."

"He says about it quite right," Alexander Ivanovich continues. "Without emotional intensity in science it is difficult to do something. A person goes to quite great hardship and should get something in return and gets - the joy of the result achieved. It does not happen very often. I should add about Akhmed - he has been in our group since the late 1990s, has worked in leading positions and is a great expert in membrane science.

YUMO, other facilities and people

Our tool is homemade. It doesn't have such a beautiful design and no designers have worked on it, as in Western developments. With our funding, we cannot hire designers. The facility operates and produces results that are not only comparable but often exceed the so-called world level. And any facility, first of all, is about specific people, with their specific actions and proposals. For example, Vadim Cherezov has worked for us for a long time. In the early 2000s, when he was still a young employee, he went abroad and proved to be a bright scientist there. He could have been nominated for the Nobel Prize but I think, restrictions on the number of nominees prevented it. I know that it was Vadim that set the key point in that work.

We have a magnetic facility that we have obtained thanks to the activities of Maria Balasoiu, a collaborator from Romania. She currently works in another group of the department but it does not interfere with our scientific cooperation. Research of materials in the magnetic field is one of the areas in which we are going to develop.

We cooperate with MIPT. They have a unique facility - the Rigaku spectrometer. In fact, it is a "three-in-one" - a small-angle X-ray instrument with a protein diffraction facility and potentially, a facility for reflectometry. The small-angle X-ray spectrometer has also appeared at FLNP and with people capable of carrying out experiments on it certainly opens up the possibility of complementary investigations with neutrons for us. In addition, MIPT has a so-called nanoscope, a facility that allows us to "see" sizes smaller than half a wavelength. There is also a cryo-electron microscope with technology for freezing biological objects, polymers and other objects. In addition, there are many lines where you can do molecular biology and express proteins.

...and a little about myself

I came to FLNP in March 1988, right after having graduated from the Department of Atomic Nucleus of the Moscow State University Physics Department. By the way, Y.M.Ostanevich was giving us a course. I had to choose between Troitsk or Dubna. I came to FLNP and was met by Andrey Muzychka and Nikolay Gorsky. The latter asked me what department I had graduated from. "How is it, atomic nucleus, we do other things!" Yury Mechislavovich had a pipe that he liked to tap, as if he was knocking out tobacco. And here, he was tapping the pipe, "You see, Kolya, the Physics Faculty gives education and we give specialty." Yury Mechislavovich passed away very early, at the age of 56. Today, I understand perfectly well what personality he was. As a young man, I did not feel it. It seems to me that scientifically, Yu.M.Ostanevich had a good basis to obtain significant results. I had only one scientific paper with him, although, in fact, there should have been two or three. The paper was published in the Annual Report for 1991 and it is dear to me not only because it was my first scientific paper. I remember how we discussed it with Yury Mechislavovich, what results seemed interesting to us and outlined possible further research.

If I recall the people that had a great influence on me, it is Nikolay Gorsky, already mentioned. He was tireless in his research, always happy when an experiment started. And when we have experiments that are currently implemented and the reactor operates, it is a very active time, the mode of life is disrupted - we work day and night. Although the unit is automated but the samples have to be changed, the results have to be processed, the task file has to be carefully written. It requires a certain amount of concentration and strength.

We get upset when in spite of the reactor's operation, some additional meetings are scheduled, or something else. Nothing can compare to the discipline of the reactor. You do it of your own free will that means that self-control comes first. And we make sure that the time of the experiment is not used in vain and we are very annoyed when losses occur for a completely unnecessary reason.

About the group

We have a large group and three employees are responsible for the facility. Sometimes, it raises questions but we don't invent anything new, there is world experience. There are quite a lot of low-angle facilities in the world. At reactors, as a rule, there is not just one such facility but two or three. It means a wide range of research carried out on them: from cements and powders, synthetic materials, polymers to biology. What can be obtained? Structure. But more often than not, structure is related to properties and by knowing the properties, you can predict something. But as Akhmed Khusainovich and I say, it is important not to do material science, that is, to study a particular material, but to generalize properties, for which you need to know a lot and have the ability to measure not only on one machine. Another thing is that interpretation is always difficult, often it cannot be unambiguous. In order to obtain Nobel Prize-level results one day, not even hundreds but thousands of people work in a narrow area. As N.I.Gorsky said, JINR would justify itself if we had at least one Nobel Prize winner. This is important but FLNR research is also of Nobel level, the Baikal Project and other DLNP activities and the work of BLTP are of a very high level. This particular work, particular facts are the basis for the future transition to a higher qualitative level. At FLNP, we have a reactor and ongoing research with condensed matter. And this is certainly world-class.

If we talk about young people, we have Alexander Ivankov and Tatiana Murugova, successful PhD candidates, already mature scientists. Ahmed Elmekawy from Egypt works as a postdoc, defended a few years ago and Asif Nabiev from Azerbaijan currently works on the continuation of his thesis. Most recently, there was a brilliant defense of Sergey Kurakin under the supervision of Norbert Kucherka. There are a lot of young people, in fact, all of them have degrees. In our group, there are also young people from MIPT, first of all Candidates of Sciences Alexey Vlasov and Yury Rizhikov. They work part-time but it is a great help in our work. They come, we communicate and there is close cooperation on science. They come at any moment when we need some help. They bring a completely different level of support for experiments to our work. And we teach them something, so there is mutual enrichment.

Our users

One of the advanced achievements includes synthetic materials dendrimers, which the history of our fruitful cooperation with academicians A.N.Ozerin and A.M.Muzafarov from the Yenikolopov Institute of Synthetic and Polymeric Materials is related to. And this topic was widely developed by our collaborator Andrey Rogachev. Today, he heads the Landau School of Physics and Technology at MIPT. Modern science is, first of all, a collective endeavor, especially in the experimental field, because in a rare area you can single-handedly prepare a sample, make measurements and process them competently. What makes dendrimers interesting? Regulated synthesis. We've been researching siloxane polymers. They can be built up layer by layer. The results obtained on X-rays and neutrons happily coincided here. And the scientific problems of dendrimers are very interesting. It's interesting to know, for example, whether the size limit occurs? Each next layer of dendrimer that is built up is denser than the previous one and so the question is, is there a physical limit to that? Intuitively, it makes sense. We watched even the tenth generation, it's hard to prepare but we couldn't see the limit.

I would like to mention one group of users - Alexey Khokhlov's team from Moscow State University. He is certainly an outstanding scientist, an academician, known for his work since the 1980s. Lately, they have been working on smart gels and in general, smart polymers. We meet structural issues for them and work in that area. It's not as easy as it sounds. You have to properly remove all incoherent scattering, all scattering arising from interaction with parts of the facility, the background and then it all depends on what kind of samples you have.

In reality, the experiment is carried out by the people responsible for the spectrometer (a particular neutron facility) but it is difficult without participation of users: often even when filling a sample, something happens and you don't know what to do. A lot depends on the preparation, consistency, temperature changes, of course, you can and should communicate remotely. But usually, those that get time on the rig can come and participate in the measurements. Of course, one enumeration of reactor users would take more than one page in a newspaper, so it remains behind brackets. I will only mention the experimenters from Slovakia, the first was Pavel Balgavi, afterwards, Daniela Ugrikova, Jana Galova and Norbert Kucherka.

We were engaged in track membranes. We made measurements using ring detectors on our spectrometer. Later, we cooperated with Gerard Pepy both at neutron sources and at the synchrotron in France. G.Pepy is a very good scientist and he worked extensively, even at a very advanced age. He was very eager to write a programme for our position-sensitive detector of a new type.

And about the weather

During the Covid, everyone was at home and by the way, the number of publications increased dramatically at the same time but there was a lack of communication. And personal communication cannot be replaced by telephone and Internet for we talk not only with words but also with gestures and body language that sometimes say more than words. That is why we need institutes and staffs where people know how to work. The most important thing is the climate in the staff, cooperation with people. Should there be a competitive spirit? Probably, yes. Yet, this is not capitalist competition but rather socialist competition. As Valentin Gordelij says, science is broad, there is enough room for everyone.

Recently, the IBR-2 reactor has started operating again but before that we had a rather long break when the reactor was shut down and it was a sad time, especially for young people. Morally, it is hard, physically, of course, it is easier - there are no mandatory shifts. Besides, there are other instruments in the world, we become users ourselves, we go to measurements. And this is where our cooperation with the MIPT Research Centre for Molecular Mechanisms of Aging that was organized by V.I.Gordelij came in handy. And even when the reactor operated, we regularly, 3-4 times a year, traveled to synchrotrons at ESRF and ILL (Grenoble, France), DESY (Germany). Today, we carry out experiments at the Chinese Synchrotron Source in Shanghai. We have many publications on the results obtained at these facilities.

If we did not have our own research areas, it would probably be boring during such long breaks, on the other hand, we kept in touch with the users and implemented quite a few of their tasks. Despite the fact that the spectrometer has been significantly modernized recently, the ideas laid down at the beginning of development of the facility and implemented over decades of its operation are valid for physics, chemistry, molecular biology and biophysics and materials science. The focus on our group, on our neutron measurements is quite high. If there is a staff and an understanding of where to go, it is great!

Olga TARANTINA,
photo by Alexander KURYATNIKOV, Elena PUZYNINA