The 14th International SHiP Experiment meeting (CERN) was recently held at NUST MISIS. During the meeting, the first CERN meeting ever held in Russia, more than 50 specialists from 12 different countries discussed current projects and the details of future work.
During the SHiP collaboration meeting, the main topic discussed was the technical issues of weak interacting neutral leptons (the necessary partners for neutrino) in the decay of heavy hadron. The potential discovery of these particles, if they do in fact exist, and how they decay, would be one of the most striking discoveries in modern physics. Likewise, the absence of that same effect will allow scientists to establish newer and stricter restrictions for a wide range of class models describing dark matter and its properties.
An open session devoted to the broader prospects of the SHiP project also occurred during the meeting. This “big picture” discussion attracted the participation of just about all the key players of the project, from Professor Andrei Golutvin, SHiP Research Director to Richard Jacobson, the project`s Technical Director. The Russian contingent at the open session included representatives from NUST MISIS, the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, and the P.N. Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
“NUST MISIS is a full member of four major international research projects of the MegaScience level. In 2015, the University officially jointed CERN’s SHiP experiment. Professor Andrei Golutvin leads the project, and in 2017 he became the head of the NUST MISIS Center for Infrastructure Collaboration & Partnership MegaScience. This year, NUST MISIS has become the only Russian University to sign a cooperation agreement with the European Organization for Nuclear Research”, said Alevtina Chernikova, Rector of NUST MISIS.
NUST MISIS is the only Russian university that has signed a cooperation agreement with CERN. The University is a member of the LHCb collaboration (an operating experiment at the Large Hadron Collider with more than 850 participants), and SHiP (an operating experiment at the SPS accelerator with more than 250 participants).
In 2018, a prototype of a tungsten—molybdenum target, one of the central nodes of the experiment, was developed and manufactured with significant input from NUST MISIS. CERN is currently testing the prototype, and the preliminary results will be available in autumn 2018.
The SHiP collaboration includes 52 institutions from 17 countries, including 9 Russian institutions. Professor Andrei Golutvin from the Imperial College London and NUST MISIS heads the experiment. That is fitting, seeing as Russian scientists first suggested the idea for the SHiP experiment. The Russian members of the team will also be designing and producing several key components for the project in the near future.
More details about the experiment can be found at https://ship.web.cern.ch/ship/.
