On the development of megascience projects

On 4 March, Valery Falkov held a working meeting with Director of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research Grigory Trubnikov.

The key topic of discussion was the expansion of international cooperation at Russian megascience facilities - the Baikal-GVD Deep Underwater Neutrino Telescope on Lake Baikal and the NICA Collider in Dubna.

The meeting was held on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research. Valery Falkov is the Plenipotentiary Representative of the Government of the Russian Federation in the Committee of Plenipotentiary Representatives of the Governments of the Member States of the Institute. Note that each JINR Member State has a representative on the Committee. Baikal-GVD is a huge scientific facility (0.7 cu. km or about four business districts "Moscow City") that is currently constructed and developed by an international collaboration that currently unites five countries. The facility is designed to study ultrahigh energy neutrino fluxes from astrophysical sources. The resulting scientific data allowed studying the processes that took place in the Universe at the early stages of its evolution and measuring signals from exotic objects of our Galaxy. Understanding the nature of these objects gives scientists the opportunity to investigate the physics of phenomena under extreme conditions and test the latest physical models. In the future, the Baikal-GVD facility will allow neutrino tomography of the Earth. It will allow significantly improving the models of its internal structure that for instance, will significantly better predict seismic activity. The Deep Underwater Neutrino Telescope operates in the unique conditions of Lake Baikal. Due to the transparency of the water, the facility significantly surpasses its competitors in a number of parameters. In just 5 years of operation, Baikal-GVD "caught up" with the results of a similar neutrino telescope IceCube, constructed at the Antarctic station Amundsen-Scott and has been operating for 16 years.

Due to the essential results achieved with the Baikal Neutrino Telescope, more and more countries show interest in participating in the project. In particular, China has expressed its readiness to jointly develop a next-generation telescope that will be about 10 times larger than the current one.

Separately, Valery Falkov and Grigory Trubnikov discussed international cooperation at the NICA Collider. At present, a session with heavy ions is carried out at the facility. The collider has already gained beams of circulating ions, united trajectories, a physical session is underway that will last until the end of March. The collaboration involves 15 countries (about two thousand people). Interest in the project is expressed by China, India, Brazil, South Africa, Chile, Mexico, Japan, a number of European countries. The NICA Accelerator Complex is developed to answer the question of how our world was formed. It is a tool for studying interactions in the field of energies, allowing for the first time in the world to investigate in detail new states of matter.

Source Ministry of Science and Higher Education