Physicists from Russian research institutes, which are now participating in the creation of the NICA collider in Dubna near Moscow, are planning to unite to implement a promising project at the Institute of Nuclear Physics (INP, Novosibirsk), Deputy Director of the Siberian Institute Evgeny Levichev told RIA Novosti.
“The first of six government-approved mega-science projects, the NICA collider, has been funded, and this inspires hope that our project will be implemented as well. In addition, in Dubna we discussed the merger of Russian physics institutes to implement such projects. I hope that by uniting, we will have more potential to “break through” the project,”he said.
Levichev noted that, despite the fact that the government of the Russian Federation has not yet allocated funds for the implementation of the Super Charm-Tau factory project, INP is using all possible funding methods, including a grant from the Russian Science Foundation, in order to prepare for its implementation.
“In 2016, we focused on work related to the injection part of the complex - a complex of installations, accelerators that produce electrons (matter) and positrons (antimatter) that will collide in the collider,” the scientist said.
In turn, Pavel Logachev, Director of the INP SB RAS, noted that the institute is very actively involved in the NICA project and hopes that physicists from Dubna and other institutes will also participate in the Siberian collider project. “We are not talking about a formal association, but about the fact that the teams of physicists, engineers, designers during the successful implementation of the first NICA project will be able to show their effectiveness, efficiency and this will be a serious reason for the state to continue working in this direction,” he said.
The project of the Super Charm-Tau Factory, a unique electron-positron collider, planned for implementation in Novosibirsk by INP specialists with the participation of scientists from other countries, was previously included in the list of six mega-science projects planned for implementation in Russia. The cost of the collider, designed to solve a wide range of problems in modern high-energy physics, is estimated at 27 billion rubles.
At the moment, as well as in the near future, there is no collider in the world that would conduct full-scale research in this energy field. This means that when the Super Charm-Tau factory is created at the INP SB RAS, it will be possible to discover fundamentally new information about the structure of elementary particles. This will allow Russia to occupy a promising niche in the advanced direction of world science.