A new issue of the Natural Science Review international journal (April – June 2025) was published. It features scientific articles in nuclear physics, mathematical physics, and applied research as part of modern experiments in neutrino physics and nuclear medicine.

    Read No. 3 2025

A scientific review by employees of the Laboratory of Theoretical Physics at JINR, Ioseph Buchbinder and Sergey Fedoruk, in collaboration with Vladimir Krykhtin (Tomsk State Pedagogical University), is dedicated to the development of massive free higher-spin bosonic field theory. The authors consider the BRST (Becchi, Rouet, Stora, and Tyutin) approach to the construction of gauge-invariant actions for these theories in terms of spin-tensor fields. The review proves that the BRST equations of motion reproduce he basic conditions for irreducible representations of the Poinc ́are group with a given mass and spin. Similar to the massless theory, the final Lagrangian for massive higher-spin fields is formulated in triplet form. It is shown that in some cases, the proposed general BRST approach leads to Singh-Hagen-like and Zinoviev-like auxiliary fields.

In the publication entitled “Bogoliubov method in description of nuclear rotation” BLTP JINR employees Rostislav Jolos and Elena Kolganova consider the problem of identifying and extracting the dynamic variables associated with symmetry transformations from the full set of dynamic variables. It is shown that this problem can be solved with the help of the Bogoliubov canonical transformation. Thus, the application of the cranking model for the description of the rotational excitations of nuclei is justified.

Another paper published in the third Natural Science Review issue is by JINR employees Vladislav Rozhkov, Ignacio Hernández González, Alexey Zhemchugov, and an employee of the Centre for the Application and Development of Nuclear Technologies (CEADEN, Havana, Cuba) Antonio Leyva Fabelo. Entitled “Characterisation of micro-SPECT system based on Timepix detector”, the article is dedicated to evaluating the characteristics of a prototype SPECT (single-photon emission computed tomography) system based on a Timepix readout chip with a MURA encoding mask. The setup has a small field of view and can be used in preclinical studies of pharmaceuticals on small laboratory animals. The research results demonstrate the feasibility of creating a compact SPECT system based on a Timepix detector with a 2-mm-thick cadmium telluride sensor and a MURA coded aperture.

The scientific paper by an employee the Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences Yuri Kudenko, “3D segmented neutrino detector SuperFGD,” describes a novel segmented plastic scintillator detector, the Super Fine Grained Detector (SuperFGD). The detector, which consists of 2 million optically isolated cubic scintillators, each with a volume of 1 cm3, is a key component of the upgraded ND280 – the near neutrino detector complex of the T2K Experiment, Japan. The detector reconstructs three-dimensional images of neutrino interactions. It records and reconstructs the parameters of final-state charged particles, including protons down to a threshold of about 300 MeV/c. In addition, the detector registers neutrons produced in muon antineutrino interactions and measures their energy by measuring the time of flight.

The publication entitled “The concept of a superconducting spin flipper – neutron decelerator for a UCN source at a pulsed reactor” by a research team from JINR, Dubna State University, and SuperOx LLC is dedicated to the concept of a neutron moderator based on a gradient spin flipper, which is the main component of the ultracold neutron source that is being designed for the IBR-2 Pulsed Reactor. The authors conducted detailed calculations of the magnetic field configuration and analysis of neutron movement in the field generated by the magnetic system being designed. The results obtained provide reasons for considering the proposed concept of an UCN source feasible.

Articles for the third issue of Natural Science Review (July – September 2025) are now being accepted. Materials for the journal’s special issue dedicated to the 70th anniversary of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research can be submitted until 31 January 2026. All the journal’s articles, including those previously published, obtain digital object identifier (DOIs). In addition, Natural Science Review is now indexed in the Google Scholar and ResearchGate databases, which increases the accessibility and citation rate of articles.

Natural Science Review is an international peer-reviewed online scientific journal published by the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research since December 2024. Quarterly issues of Natural Science Review cover a wide range of scientific topics: physics, fundamental and applied research, interdisciplinary research, mathematical and computer sciences, life sciences, Earth sciences, chemistry, etc.