Comment on the event

"We believe in the absolute and unifying value of science"

The results of the meeting of the Committee of Plenipotentiaries that was held on 23-24 November in Egypt are commented by JINR Director Grigory Trubnikov.

A new membership of the Scientific Council was elected at the meeting. Does it mean a new geometry of scientific collaboration?

The JINR Scientific Council consists of about 50 prominent scientists, leaders in science from all over the world that work in the thematic areas of JINR. Each JINR Member State has the right to appoint one representative, the others are elected at the CP meeting. The Scientific Council has always gone far beyond JINR Member States, reflecting the international standing of our Institute and the extensive working relationships of Dubna scientists. The current election of the new Scientific Council has confirmed this rule.

As for the "new geometry", indeed, the new membership of the Scientific Council reflects the trends in the development of the Institute's international cooperation in the recent past, although this past should be measured in a good ten years, or even more. In particular, for the first time, the JINR Scientific Council includes representatives of Latin America: Argentina, Brazil, Mexico. The reverse is also true - the members of the Scientific Council are ambitious scientists well known in their countries and working relationships of JINR with these countries, surely, will be further strengthened. And of course, it is important to note that since this year, the Scientific Council has included a representative of Egypt.

Despite the unstable political situation in the world, the Institute implements its international research programme. What promising international and regional vectors of scientific cooperation do you see as a priority?

The first priority for us, of course, includes our Member States and their interests, as well as Associate Members. At the same time, the extensive partner network of the Institute that includes about 1000 organizations in 70 countries, reflects the interests of scientists from all over the world to cooperate with JINR. Article 1 of the Charter of our Institute points out activities based on the principles of its openness for participation to all the interested states, of their equal and mutually beneficial cooperation. Therefore, it is necessary to look at priorities in the areas of cooperation from this point of view.

Thanks to a variety of interesting scientific tasks and progress in the construction of the NICA collider, we have increasing scientific relationships with China, India, the Republic of Korea, Latin American countries and many others. Egypt aims at intensifying cooperation in the Arab world, Vietnam - in the countries of Southeast Asia, Bulgaria and Serbia are interested in developing cooperation in the Balkans.

A year ago, in November, at the CP session in Bulgaria, the "Sofia Declaration" was adopted, to which we invite interested states and scientific organizations to join the multilateral scientific, technical and educational cooperation implemented by JINR for peaceful scientific, technological, social , economic and cultural development of countries on all continents of planet Earth - our common home. This is our priority vector.

The meeting of the Committee of Plenipotentiaries was followed by the Egypt-JINR Joint Coordination Committee. What is this body and what decisions did it take?

The Joint Coordination Committee of JINR with a certain country is an executive body that includes representatives both from the country and the administration of the Institute. Its task is to coordinate efforts to develop cooperation with the current country. There are such Committees with a number of Member States and Associate Members, Egypt is no exception in this sense. However, there is still a peculiarity. The Egypt-JINR Coordination Committee has met 10 times since Egypt was an Associate Member and the main task of the Committee was to manage the cooperation programme funded from the Egyptian contribution. But since November last year, a new task has been added - to promote the rapid rise of cooperation to a qualitatively new level, corresponding to the status of a full-fledged Member State of the Institute.

At the end of January, a meeting of the Committee was held via videoconference that summed up the final results of the associate membership period and set goals for the immediate transition period and on 24 November, within the framework of the session of the Committee of Plenipotentiaries, a full-fledged, in-person, 12th meeting was held, at which the results of the first year of Egypt's full membership were summed up.

The focus was on the task of formulating a strategy for the development of cooperation between Egypt and JINR, taking into account the long-term development plan of the Institute and the national strategy of Egypt in science and technology. The use of cooperation between Arab Republic of Egypt and JINR for the development of cooperation in fundamental research in the region of the Middle East and North Africa was also highlighted. Joint events, the participation of Egyptian youth in the educational programmes of the Institute and the expansion of the range of scientific communications were discussed. The JINR Information Centre at the Academy of Scientific Research and Technology in Cairo plays a significant role in this matter.

But most importantly, all the required prerequisites for the arrival of Egyptian scientists in Dubna have been created. We hope to see them in our laboratories very soon.

For the first time, the Seven-Year Plan for the Development of JINR in 2024-2030 was presented to the plenipotentiary representatives of the JINR Member States. What is its fundamental difference from the previous seven-year plan?

Like the Seven-Year Plan for the Development of JINR (2017-2023) that is currently implemented, the new Medium-Term Plan was developed on the basis of a deep and comprehensive analysis and forecasting, in which, along with JINR scientists, leading scientists and experts from many scientific centres - world leaders in the JINR profile areas of science took part. During the previous period, that lasted about 15 years, a major upgrade of the research and social infrastructure was underway at JINR and a lot of work was carried out to strengthen the intellectual potential. The multidisciplinary scientific base developed over the years should bear fruit today.

The Superheavy Element Factory at the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions has already started working. The Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Problems is in the active phase of building the Baikal-GVD Deep-Underwater Neutrino Telescope and the results of its work currently accumulate. The NICA accelerator complex is scheduled to be put into operation next year and the international programme on the MPD detector is due to start in 2024. The Multifunctional Information and Computing Complex of the Laboratory of Information Technologies widely develops; it not only follows world trends in information technologies, but is also ahead of them in some areas. At the Frank Laboratory of Neutron Physics and the Laboratory of Radiation Biology, international centres for multiple-access widely develop. It is very important to increase the volume and efficiency of using this unique infrastructure for the development of scientific research in the interests of all JINR Member States in collaboration with partner organizations in different countries of the world in the coming years. The entire scientific infrastructure of JINR should become an open platform for scientists, engineers and specialists from all over the world. To speak figuratively, we consider the next seven-year period as a time of "harvesting" of the world's unique scientific infrastructure. The Committee of Plenipotentiaries of the Governments of the JINR Member States supported this approach.

In your report, you presented the scientific results of the Institute's work over the previous year. What do you consider to be the most significant achievements?

These major achievements were highlighted by the Committee of Plenipotentiaries in the final protocol.

The attention of both the scientists of our Institute and the world scientific community is riveted to the implementation of the NICA mega-science project that is also extremely important for the forthcoming seven-year plan. In this regard, the successful implementation of the fourth technological cycle of the NICA accelerator complex, starting since September 2022, is undoubtedly a significant achievement. In preparation for it, the modernization of the Nuclotron was started with the rearrangement of 20% of its components, the simultaneous operation of the three main accelerators of the NICA complex for accelerating argon and xenon ions was ensured, the extraction of the xenon ion beam was prepared to start not a technological, but a 800-hour physical BM@N experiment of the International Collaboration that should give new interesting results, as well as a very successful progress in the production of superconducting magnets and their installation in NICA collider tunnel.

During the current session at the NICA accelerator complex, a significant result was obtained - the first circulation of xenon ions in the high intensity Nuclotron in the history of the project. For the first time, a complete heavy ion accelerator complex, including an electron-string ion source, a heavy-ion linear accelerator, a booster and the Nuclotron, was implemented. The intensity of the xenon heavy ion beam accelerated in the Nuclotron is about 10⁷ particles. The ion source, linear accelerator and booster were adjusted to accelerate argon and xenon ions. After acceleration in the booster, xenon ions were recharged to bare nuclei state, injected into the Nuclotron and stable circulation of the beam accelerated to an energy of about 3 GeV/nucleon was obtained. In the home country of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, in Russia, such heavy ions are currently no longer accelerated to relativistic energies in any scientific centre. In addition, within the framework of the current session, the SOCHI applied station on argon ions was tested that will irradiate chips in the future.

The installation of all dipoles in the arches of the collider tunnel has been completed. The work goals of the NICA-MPD International Collaboration to design all components of the MPD detector required for its technological launch in 2023, including cryogenics, control and power supply systems, detector subsystems and much more, have also been completely achieved.

In April 2022, the Baikal Neutrino Telescope for observing natural neutrino fluxes reached an efficient deep-underwater detector volume of 0.5 km³. A significant result has been the registration of 24 high-energy neutrino events with this largest neutrino telescope in the Northern Hemisphere that preliminary confirmed the observation of astrophysical neutrino fluxes by the IceCube Observatory in the Southern Hemisphere.

At the Superheavy Element Factory, further pioneering research on the synthesis of a new isotope darmstadtium ²⁷⁶Ds in the ⁴⁸Ca + ²³²Th reaction was carried out and the first experiment to study the chemical properties of flerovium 114Fl and copernicium 112Cn was successfully prepared for late 2022 on the GRAND Separator.

It should be noted that the work aforementioned, as well as the participation of JINR in international collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider, would have been impossible without the active development of the JINR Multifunctional Computing Complex, including the modernization of the Govorun supercomputer carried out in 2022 and the successful work of the Tier1 Centre of the CMS and NICA-MPD collaborations.

The final results of the year are yet to be summed up at the spring meeting of the JINR Scientific Council and the CP but as can be seen from the hundreds of publications by scientists of the Institute in leading scientific journals, very interesting results have been obtained in the theoretical physics of elementary particles, nuclei and condensed matter, modern mathematical physics, as well as in radiation research in the life sciences, a relatively new and rapidly developing research area for JINR.

JINR is one of the largest international scientific organizations. In line with its time-honored motto, "Science brings nations together," the Institute is an essential part of global science diplomacy processes. What are the current complex geopolitical challenges for this mission of the Institute and how does the Institute deal with them?

I agree that JINR has indeed been an efficient participant in authentic scientific diplomacy for more than six decades. Of course, during the Cold War, the terminology was different, but this does not negate the fact that then (in the most difficult times of political confrontation between East and West), scientists from various countries managed to build strong scientific bridges at the site in Dubna. The establishment of our Institute as an open international laboratory on the territory of the USSR was a wise and far-sighted decision of politicians and scientists of that time.

Undoubtedly, today, we all go through very difficult times. But I still cannot agree that these are tectonic shifts when applied to scientific dialogue. In these turbulent times, it seems to me that in the scientific community we have preserved the most important thing - personal communication and relationships.

Of course, the political climate dealt a severe blow to the quality and level of scientific cooperation, especially with Western colleagues. But human relationships of scientists, driven by a passion for science, are stronger than these trials.

Therefore, there is simply no absolute answer to the question of whether science diplomacy has withstood the challenges of our time. Of course, the "foam" of the fashionable discourse on science diplomacy has been lightweight, it has washed away. But the supporting structures have been exposed and have survived - and this, I repeat, is the scientific brotherhood of scientists, loyalty to science, the value of science.

Of course, science diplomacy should develop tools for efficient work under the new conditions. But it is a process that requires wisdom, new ideas, energy and experience. For this purpose, for instance, at JINR we have established an informal science and diplomacy club (working title Dubna Green Chamber Talks), on the platform of which experts from various countries exchange their ideas on what tools of science diplomacy would be optimal in our time. We all believe in the absolute and unifying value of science for the sustainable development of future generations and our civilization: science unites.

Material prepared by the JINR Press Office