NSU has launched an Interdisciplinary Research Center on Elementary Particle Physics and Astrophysics, with Laboratories already involved into experiments on famous colliders in CERN, KEK, GSI, etc. The Center is headed by Alexander Dolgov, a professor at the University of Ferrara (Italy).
The new Center consists of 13 Laboratories including the Laboratory of Cosmology and Elementary Particle Physics, which was created by Prof. Alexander Dolgov in 2011 while doing his research for a Megagrant.
Right now the researchers are processing data from experiments on the ATLAS detector, one of the detectors used for studying Higgs boson. Our Laboratories also participate in such experiments as LHCb, BaBar (SLAK, USA), Belle (KEK, Japan), BESIII (NRCKI, China), as well as research hadrons including c-quark and b-quark.
One of the tasks of the Interdisciplinary Research Center is to develop detectors for physics experiments. For instance, a unique aerogel based Cherenkov detector is being created, which allows measuring particle velocities to a high precision. Another detector is a two-phase liquid argon detector for Dark Matter Detection. NSU also considers creating a few experimental laboratories to enter research for international astrophysics experiments.
The budget of the Interdisciplinary Research Center on Elementary Particle Physics and Astrophysics for 2015 is 40 mln roubles. Currently, the Center is being funded as a Top-100 project, but it plans to gain resources solely from grants and contests. The Center being a university-based unit, NSU researchers and students of the Physics Department as well as researchers from the Novosibirsk Scientific Center institutes are actively involved into its work.
Mikhail Achasov, the deputy director of the Center, says, “NSU students play an active role in the laboratory research. One of the promising directions that the Center is heading for is astrophysics research including cosmology and cosmic-ray physics, which has not been developed in Novosibirsk yet. We are planning to enroll students and post-graduates for a program on Astrophysics, a new one for NSU.”
