On 20 October, the International Conference “RFBR Grants for NICA” organized by the Laboratory of High Energy Physics JINR started in the Joint Institute. Due to the unfavourable epidemiological situation, the event is held in the video conference format.

In 2019, 97 applications were submitted for the competition of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research on the topic “Fundamental properties and phase transitions of hadron and quark-gluon matter: mega-science facility “Complex NICA”” (“Mega-science – NICA”). According to the results of independent Russian and foreign inspection, 36 projects were supported within the competition.

The conference gives an excellent opportunity for each grant holder to present the results and status of the project so that to get a possibility to continue the work in the frames of the RFBR grant.

Members of the JINR Directorate and leaders of the mega-science project NICA addressed the audience with their welcoming speeches at the opening of the conference. Talks by JINR leaders were united by the expression of gratitude to the Russian Foundation for Basic Research and the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of Russia for the organization and support of the grant programme for NICA projects.

Photos by Igor Lapenko

Welcoming participants of the event, JINR Director V. A. Matveev wished them successful and fruitful work and noted that this event is a kind of victory over unfavourable conditions of the pandemic. Head of the Directorate of the NICA project, JINR First Vice-Director G. V. Trubnikov in his talk noted that this conference is an important event for the NICA project that allows maintaining the pace of the project’s implementation and demonstrating the results of two years of hard work. He also noted that the project is getting more and more popular not only in the country of its location – the Russian Federation – but also in the world. It is evidenced by the recently signed agreements with Germany and the People’s Republic of China on the participation in the project, as well as the agreement with Poland, namely the University of Warsaw, being drafted now. Leader of the NICA project, JINR Vice-Director V. D. Kekelidze noted that the video conference format did not allow demonstrating the progress in the construction of the NICA complex in person. Nevertheless, it allowed testing the organization of a video conference organized on the new Russian video conference platform VOLNA.

On behalf of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, the overview report on the RFBR grant programme for the NICA mega-science project was made by Deputy Chairman of the RFBR Board V. V. Kvardakov who conveyed greetings to participants of the meeting from Chairman of the RFBR Board V. Ya. Panchenko. At the end of his speech, V. V. Kvardakov made a proposal to hold the next meeting of the RFBR Board in Dubna.

In the frames of the conference, overview sessions with reports by leaders of the NICA project and the BM@N, MPD and SPD experiments are organized. Moreover, overview reports by representatives of experiments at the FAIR, LHC, and RHIC accelerator facilities will be presented.

The main focus of the conference will be the reports of RFBR grant holders presented in one of the following sections:

1. Theoretical studies of the dense baryonic matter produced in heavy-ion collisions at NICA.
2. Big data processing and species recognition.
3. Global characteristics of heavy-ion collisions at NICA.
4. Collectivity and correlations (collective flow and vorticity; HBT and correlations).
5. Calorimetry and electromagnetic probes.
6. Precision tracking and the production of light hadrons, strangeness, hypernuclei, and heavy-flavor.
7. Development of detectors and detection methods for NICA experiments.

Proceedings of the conference will be published in special issues of the journal “Physics of Elementary Particles and Atomic Nuclei” (PEPAN) in 2021.

The conference will be finished on 23 October.