Authoritative event in particle physics
Its history started in 1950 at the University of Rochester in the United States, where, at the initiative of the American physicist Robert Marshak, the first meeting was held, and the first seven conferences were held in this American city. It was thanks to the place of its birth that the Conference forever retained the informal name Rochester in the physical community, even after the geography of its holding had radically expanded. Since 1960, the Conference has begun to be held by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) and has acquired a truly global character. They started to hold it every two years in different countries of the world. Since then, it has managed to become a guest in numerous scientific centres in Europe, Asia, North America and Australia. In 1964, this Conference was held in Dubna. The reports presented at this Conference relate to the entire range of problems of high energy physics and allow one to see a whole section of the state of this field of science.
In 2026, the Rochester Conference was first held in Latin America. It gathered more than 900 participants and a record number - 956 reports. JINR at this Conference was represented by an impressive delegation of 33 people, most of whom were young scientists from VBLHEP, BLTP and DLNP. Thanks to it, all the main JINR projects in the field of particle physics were well presented at the sectional reports - the NICA Collider and the BM@N, MPD and SPD experiments, the deep‑sea neutrino telescope on Lake Baikal, the TAIGA, DANSS experiments, the results obtained by the JINR employees in the framework of NOvA, LEGEND‑1000, MONUMENT, ALICE, CMS collaborations, as well as a large number of theoretical papers.
In general, the Conference in Natal brought together many young scientists from all over the world. Unfortunately, US national laboratories were poorly represented, as well as some European countries. Alas, there were few Russian participants. The reports at the Conference showed that the main source of experimental data is still the Large Hadron Collider, the experiments on which have shifted towards precision measurements and tests of the Standard Model. Many new results have traditionally been brought by experiments at the flavor factories - BELLEII and BESIII. In addition, the interest of the scientific community continues to shift towards experiments to study the properties of neutrinos, the search for dark matter and particle astrophysics, where observatories for observing gravitational waves are currently a full‑fledged participant in multichannel astronomical observations. Reports on future accelerators and their experiments emphasize high expectations for new experimental facilities but the prospects for their construction is still unclear. Under these conditions, the launch of the NICA Collider looks like an extremely attractive event in experimental particle physics.
This year, JINR became the "platinum sponsor" of ICHEP-2026. Thanks to it, it became possible to present the Institute in the exhibition programme of the Conference: during the plenary sessions, there was a mini-pavilion in which you could get information about JINR. Thanks to the professionalism of the JINR University Centre, the design of the pavilion turned out to be colorful and memorable that helped to attract more than a hundred conference participants to it. Especially valuable was communication with the representatives of Brazilian universities and research centres, primarily, the CNPEM centre, in which the source of SIRIUS synchrotron radiation and of high-tech companies is constructed and operates from its innovation belt. It enriched the JINR employees with new contacts and laid the potential for joint research. This is especially important in the context of the development of cooperation between JINR and Brazil within the framework of the 2025 intergovernmental agreement. In addition to detailed information about JINR's flagship scientific projects, all visitors to the pavilion also learned about the new journal Natural Science Review that is published by our Institute.
In general, JINR's participation in the 43rd International Conference on High Energy Physics was quite successful, allowed presenting our Institute and its scientific results at the most important event in particle physics and also helped strengthening cooperation with Brazilian scientists and introducing JINR staff to this beautiful and hospitable country.
JINR Deputy Chief Scientific Secretary Alexey Zhemchugov
Representative delegation, significant reports
The event and trip were memorable but the JINR delegation made the greatest impression on me. This is the first time I've been involved in such a big outing. It is especially gratifying that this was at the most famous and largest particle physics conference in the world. JINR's participation in the event was very noticeable: about 30 people out of 1000 participants, several people were heads of topical sections. For some of the sections, flagship for the Institute, the content of reports from JINR also amounted to a significant percentage. In addition, there was another innovation - the JINR stand that served in a sense as an "embassy" and a meeting place with those that cooperated with the Institute and today are interested in cooperation. I am very glad that I was part of such a large community of like‑minded people.
Deputy Head of Department of DLNP Lyudmila Kolupaeva
Tripartite partnership and cross‑experiments
On the sidelines of the Conference, a meeting was held with the senior specialist in research and development cooperation at the Brazilian Centre for Research in Energy and Materials (CNPEM) Gabriela Ferreira and Head of Department of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at CNPEM Claudia Caparelli. During the meeting, the possibilities of implementing complementary research within the framework of the ARIADNA scientific programme at the NICA Complex and applied work using the CNPEM infrastructure were discussed.
The issues of organizing cross-experiments with the use of beams of accelerated NICA ions and synchrotron radiation of the SIRIUS facility in the field of biological research, obtaining new materials using radiation treatment, as well as the use of charged particle accelerators for radiation medicine tasks were discussed.
The mutual interest of JINR and CNPEM representatives was aroused by the reports of O. Belov on the scientific programme of the ARIADNA collaboration, of E. Syresin on stations for applied research at the NICA Complex and of CNPEM Director General Antonio Jose Roque da Silva on the infrastructure and main areas of work of the Brazilian centre, a significant part of which is the scientific research aimed at meeting socially significant tasks.
In the course of communication, the representatives of CNPEM were particularly interested in the field of superconducting magnets in the context of CNPEM developments to establish superconducting systems for their own facilities and for CERN.
A representative of the Belarusian research and production company ArkoLab Kirill Levkov took an active part in the discussions held on the sidelines of the Conference. ArkoLab is a technological partner of JINR, implementing work on the development of a TPC cooling system for MPD and a number of sample environment systems for the ARIADNA scientific programme. The issues of tripartite partnership in the implementation of JINR orders using the technological potential of CNPEM and cooperating organizations of Brazil were considered.
Given the high complementarity of the ARIADNA applied research programmes at JINR and SIRIUS at CNPEM, the parties agreed to plan several cross-experiments at the facilities of the two organizations.
Deputy Head of Division No. 5 of VBLHEP Oleg Belov
Potential for collaboration
The first thing that catches your eye on the way from the airport to the hotel is the abundance of unusual vegetation. The dense jungle of unknown trees and bushes is radically different from the landscape we are used to. The hotel gave us a warm welcome, yet English is difficult to speak to the staff but they are quick to use online translators to meet any problem.
The Brazilians are very warm towards tourists from Russia, they are glad that we were able to visit their country and are interested in our life. In general, we can say that during our stay in Brazil there have never been any misunderstandings or negativity - both from the "local" and from other Conference participants and tourists from all over the world.
The landscapes of autumn or winter of Dubna delighted them with their beauty and unusualness. Indeed, in Natal, located at the equator, year-round summer differs by season only in rains, winds or heat.
The ICHEP-2026 Conference brought together many participants from all over the world, our reports, of course, looked very worthy against the background of others and the relevance of Dubna's reports was especially highlighted with their clear union with real, operating facilities and world‑class experiments (Baikal‑GVD, NICA, TAIGA and others).
I was lucky to meet the students of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN) and they kindly accompanied me on my entire business trip. They showed their study campus, talked about the features of learning and in general about life in Brazil. At the exhibition at the Conference, we met with representatives of accelerator centres, in particular, with colleagues from CNPEM and WEG, at the stand of which there were high‑quality products of accelerator equipment: pickup electrodes, detectors, magnetic elements - quadrupole lenses.
Summing up, I can say that the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, as an international scientific platform in the Russian Federation and Brazilian scientific organizations, universities and high-tech companies have the potential for cooperation of varying degrees. In particular, I and students from Brazil made a joint request for internship under the START programme with further probable employment in VBLHEP. Currently, we work on possible areas of projects and will apply for participation in the UC programme with NICA projects.
Leading engineer of Division No. 1 of VBLHEP Dmitry Ponkin