Their names are in the history of the Institute

Professor Igor Anatolievich Golutvin:
"A whole generation has grown up here"

On 8 August, the JINR International Conference Centre will host the International Scientific Seminar "Experimental Methods in Particle Physics" dedicated to the memory of Professor I.A.Golutvin that would have turned 90 this year. Academician Victor Matveev will open the Seminar. The programme includes reports and speeches by A.V.Zarubin, Yu.Ts.Oganessian, M.K.Volkov and other leading scientists, as well as Igor Anatolievich's colleagues from the RDMS collaboration.
At one of the previous seminars, Igor Anatolievich met with the editor of the weekly "Dubna" and kindly responded to the invitation to talk about the topics that particularly excited and occupied him at that time.

You started RDMS 20 years ago... Why?

Not to improve our own social status, that's for sure. We already had a very interesting life. But for the purpose that we would have not so much awards, as significant scientific results. And the CMS programme helped to make this dream come true. In the summer of 2012, we reported on the discovery of the Higgs boson. It was recognized as the discovery of the year and entered the annals of physics. Our contribution to this discovery was also sufficiently noted. (By decision of the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences, I.A.Golutvin was awarded the P.A.Cherenkov Prize for his major contribution to development of the CMS detector that resulted in the discovery of the Higgs boson - Ed.). A large staff worked here. On average, one hundred articles are published per year on the physical results obtained at our facility. Three years of work - more than three hundred articles in the world's leading publications. However, the real scientific result is the discovery of Higgs. For, this result, this discovery changes our general ideas about the structure of matter, the structure of the world. The rest are also important, they confirm something, but they do not have such epochal significance...

What's next?

The future of RDMS CMS can be traced for at least 30 years ahead. Twenty years ago, CMS was developed based on the latest achievements in science and technology, current technologies. But nevertheless, these years have passed. This is an electronic detector and the electronic database changes very seriously every three years. Everything becomes obsolete. It needs to be changed. The detector was designed for an intensity at which the total volume of data should be about 300 inverse femtobarns. Therefore, we are currently engaged in the so-called upgrade. We shut down the detector at the end of March, 2013 and in a year, it will operate again. Since spring 2015, the LHC will achieve its design parameters. The first phase of reconstruction is currently underway and it is clear what needs to be done here. We are just finishing what we did not finish before the comissioning of the collider. The next shutdown of the collider is in 2018.

Next, we will begin to work at intensities much higher than before and the total volume of data will increase by 10 times - 3 inverse attobarns. That is, the detector will not withstand radiation loads. Faster detectors and systems are needed. The second phase of reconstruction is due to the fact that the intensity will increase by an order of magnitude. And my colleagues and I are currently engaged in it. By the end of the year, we should release a project for the reconstruction of end hadron calorimeters. It's a lot of work. First of all, we need to understand why all this is necessary, because reconstruction, it would seem, brings nothing but trouble. It costs a lot of money. What will we learn as a result, what will physics benefit from this? This is the first question. And secondly, there is an idea on how to do all this. And at present, we develop this idea. In four places: Tashkent, Minsk, Kharkov, Dubna.

About Seminar

We held this joint seminar to discuss not only the results obtained, but also the most advanced, the boldest ideas that are required for the further development of research at the updated collider, the reconstruction of the experimental facilities operating on its beams. This television seminar unites scientists and specialists in real time in Dubna and Tomsk, Irkutsk and Novosibirsk, Geneva and Moscow... And we have achieved the effect of presence. That is, everyone sitting in any audience feels like they are together with everyone else in one common audience - they can ask something from their place and everyone will hear them, they will answer them and everyone will hear it...

About personal plans

And my personal plans are as follows. My dad used to say about his age: you shouldn't plan for more than a year ahead - it's a bad omen... And yet, in the future, I want to write a small book. In it, I want to remember the remarkable people that one way or another influenced my fate, my scientific biography. Alexander Raspletin, under whose supervision I started as a specialist in the organization that is now called SPA "Almaz". Vladimir Veksler, who I worked for eight years with. Viktor Sviridov, who I closely collaborated and was friends for thirty years with. Nikolay Govorun... All of them didn't even manage to live to sixty, but they did so much that the fruits of their labor will be valued for many years to come. Perhaps, there is a fifth one - Sir John Adams, the founder of the CERN accelerator family. And also Borya Dolgoshein. Boris Anatolievich...

(What a pity that Igor Anatolievich did not manage to realize this dream. He was a great friend of our editorial board and constantly followed the news at the Institute and other laboratories and responded eagerly to the newspaper's requests to tell about the affairs of his staff. - Ed.)

23 years of life have been dedicated to the CMS project. An entire generation has grown up. And today, although they talk about the outflow of talented youth from physics, there are many young, attractive faces around us both in Dubna and at CERN. I really hope that our successors will be able to absorb from us all the best that we have learned from previous generations.

I had the pleasure and happiness of working at a wonderful Institute. And at the same time, I have been doing one thing all my life that I love very much. In fact, throughout this period, I have worked with almost the same people. The name of the place of work changed, but the staff was the same, we all worked together. And I also love these people very much. And for it, I can only thank fate.

Based on publications in the weekly "Dubna"
10 August, 1994, 7 August, 2009, 8 August, 2014
Evgeny MOLCHANOV