Institute of Nuclear Physics, Institute of Nuclear Physics, RAS. What did I see

At the Institute of Nuclear Physics. G.I. Budker SB RAS launched a powerful injector of a beam of hydrogen atoms with a design particle energy of up to one million electron volts.

In this injector, a beam of atoms is formed by neutralizing a beam of negative hydrogen ions accelerated to the required energy. This experimental installation was developed and manufactured by order of the American company TAE Technologies, which is creating a neutron-free thermonuclear reactor. Using the installation, scientists plan to test the plasma heating technology in the TAE Technologies reactor and demonstrate the reliability and high efficiency of all injector elements.

Video from youtube.com/ https://www.youtube.com/embed/8C5XF2_NvgU

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Scientists at the Institute of Nuclear Physics (INP) of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences modernized the synchrotron radiation generator they created: they were the first in the world to stop the evaporation of liquid helium, which cooled the installation and required constant refueling. The improved generator will start working in the Italian laboratory ELETTRA at the beginning of 2018, the press service of the Institute of Nuclear Physics SB RAS reported on Thursday. “The Institute of Nuclear Physics SB RAS created a superconducting wiggler for the ELETTRA laboratory - a device for generating synchrotron radiation - in 2003, in January 2018, BINP SB RAS staff will complete a radical modernization of this device, in which for the first time it will be possible to avoid the evaporation of liquid helium in a cryogenic system. The cost of modernization is estimated at more than $500 thousand,” the statement says. A strong magnetic field is created in the wiggler, and the device must be cooled using liquid helium. “The helium evaporates, and you have to spend tens of thousands of dollars a year on refueling. We have learned to create cryostats based on special refrigeration machines that can operate reliably for years without evaporating liquid helium, which no one in the world has yet demonstrated,” the press service quotes the leading researcher at the Institute of Nuclear Physics SB RAS.

The ELETTRA laboratory in Italy is an open platform for experiments at a specialized electron accelerator - a source of synchrotron radiation. With the help of this radiation, various studies are carried out: from studying the structure of materials and new pharmaceuticals to cancer cell therapy.

tass.ru

NOVOSIBIRSK, December 25. /TASS/. Scientists at the Institute of Nuclear Physics (INP) of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk have created and launched a unique “Smola” installation (a spiral magnetic open trap), which will allow in the future to increase plasma heating from 10 million degrees several times, the deputy director of the BINP SB RAS told reporters on Monday for scientific work Alexander Ivanov.

In the future, the trap will be used in an environmentally friendly thermonuclear reactor operating without super-heavy hydrogen.

“We have a gas dynamic trap (GDT) installation, in which we have already heated the plasma to 10 million degrees. If you supply it with such elements (such as “Resin” - TASS note), then the temperature of the plasma should increase several times. This idea for the development of linear plasma motion systems was put forward for the first time in the world,” Ivanov said.

The world's first model of the formation of volcanic processes was created using a unique installation for electron beam welding by scientists from the Institute of Nuclear Physics (INP) and the Institute of Geology and Mineralogy (IGM) of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The chief researcher of the Institute of Geology and Mineralogy of the SB RAS, Viktor Sharapov, told the media about this.

According to him, scientists, using their installation, managed to melt rocks that were taken from the Avachinsky volcano in Kamchatka. Now Siberian scientists will be able to simulate seismic processes that occur at a depth of 40-70 kilometers while studying ore deposits.

At the KEK accelerator center (Tsukuba, Japan), the installation of the Belle II detector at the beam meeting point of the SuperKEKB collider has been completed, reports the press service of KEK (the Japanese organization for the study of high-energy accelerators).

The total weight of the detector exceeds 1400 tons. One of its key systems - a 40-ton electromagnetic calorimeter based on cesium iodide crystals - was created and developed with the decisive participation of the Institute of Nuclear Physics. G.I. Budker SB RAS (BINP SB RAS) and Novosibirsk State University (NSU). The integration of the detector and accelerator is an important step toward starting data collection later this year.

The Institute of Nuclear Physics SB RAS has developed a special installation that has a targeted effect on even the most resistant tumor

Siberian scientists do not want to say that this is a breakthrough in the treatment of cancer, but they do not diminish their merits in its creation. The scientific know-how is called “boron-neutron capture therapy for cancer.” It’s surprising, but the essence of the invention can instill hope in the souls of tens of thousands of compatriots, for whom oncologists cannot yet help... The device is, of course, putting it mildly. In fact... it occupies a special protected room with an area of 60 square meters. The leading researcher at the institute, Sergei Taskaev, spoke about the operating principles of the installation and explained why its creators had doubts.

Institute of Nuclear Physics named after. G.I. Budker (INP) of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences signed a contract for 20 million euros with the European Center for Research of Ions and Antiprotons (FAIR, Germany), according to which they will produce unique equipment for the accelerator, scientific director of FAIR, academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences Boris Sharkov, told reporters.

FAIR is the largest accelerator complex for the study of modern nuclear and subnuclear physics, created in Germany with the participation of 15 countries. The project is comparable in scale to the Large Hadron Collider (CERN), its total cost is estimated at about a billion euros. Experiments at FAIR are scheduled to begin in 2020.

Scientists from the Institute of Nuclear Physics named after. G.I. Budker SB RAS and the Institute of General Physics named after. A.M. Prokhorov RAS, with the support of a grant from the Russian Science Foundation, have developed a new generation of high-speed electron-optical devices for diagnosing beams in charged particle accelerators - a dissector based on a streak camera. This device allows you to monitor the clot length in real time. The manufactured devices are already used for fine-tuning accelerator complexes, as well as for studying the dynamics of relativistic beams. The results of the work were published in the Journal of Instrumentation.

NOVOSIBIRSK, July 4. /TASS/. The cooling ring for the FAIR research accelerator complex under construction in Germany, which is being compared to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), was designed by specialists from the Novosibirsk Institute of Nuclear Physics (INP) SB RAS. This was reported to TASS by the head of the institute’s research laboratory, Dmitry Schwartz.

“FAIR has many challenges for working with ions and antiproton beams. Antiprotons are produced when a proton beam with an energy of 29 gigaelectronvolts (an electronvolt is a unit of measurement for the energy of an elementary particle - TASS note) is dropped onto a target. But these antiprotons need to be captured in a ring and cooled - this is the task of our Collector ring,” Schwartz said.

Scientists from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Siberian Branch (INP SB) RAS have developed unique equipment for a prototype of an environmentally friendly thermonuclear reactor being designed in the USA.

The work was carried out within the framework of a multimillion-dollar contract between the Siberian institute and the American company Tri Alpha Energy (TAE), scientific secretary of the RAS branch Alexey Vasiliev told TASS, refusing to name the full cost of the delivery.

It is generally difficult to talk about INP in a nutshell for many reasons. First of all, because our Institute does not fit into the usual standards. This is not exactly an academic institute working on fundamental science, because it has its own production, which is quite similar to a mediocre plant, but in modern times - a good plant. And at this plant they don’t make nails with cans, but they have technologies that simply don’t exist anywhere in Russia. Modern technologies in the most precise sense of the word, and not in the “modern for the Soviet Union of the 80s.” And this plant is our own, and not one where the owners are “out there somewhere” and we are just collecting products in a pile.
So this is by no means an academic Institute.

But not production either. What kind of production is this if the Institute still considers the main product to be the most fundamental result, and all this wonderful technological filling and production is just a way to get this result?

So, it’s still a scientific institute with a fundamental profile?
But what about the fact that the BINP carries out the widest range of experiments related to Synchrotron Radiation (hereinafter SR) or free electron laser (hereinafter FEL), and these are exclusively applied experiments for dozens of our institutes? And, by the way, they have almost no other opportunity to conduct such experiments.

So this is a multidisciplinary institute?
Yes. And much, much more...

This story could begin with the history of the institute. Or from today. From descriptions of installations or people. From a story about the state of Russian science or the achievements of physics in recent days. And I hesitated for a very long time before choosing a direction, until I decided to tell about everything a little, sincerely hoping that someday I will write more and post this material somewhere.

So, INP SB RAS named after. G.I.Budkera or simply the Institute of Nuclear Physics.
It was founded in 1958 by Gersh Itskovich Budker, whose name at the Institute was Andrei Mikhailovich, God knows why. No, of course, he was a Jew, Jewish names were not welcomed in the USSR - this is all clear. But I was not able to find out why Andrei Mikhailovich, and not Nikolai Semenovich, say.
By the way, if you hear something like “Andrei Mikhailovich said...” at the INP, it means Budker said.
He is the founder of the Institute and probably, if not for him, and if not for Siberia, we would never have had such developed accelerator physics. The fact is that Budker worked for Kurchatov, and according to rumors, it was simply cramped for him there. And they would never have allowed it to “swing” the way it happened in Siberia, where new institutions were just being created and new directions were opening up. And they wouldn’t have given him the Institute right away in Moscow at that age. First, they would have made him look bad at the position of head of the lab, then the deputy director, in general, you see, he would have lost his temper and left.

Budker went to Novosibirsk and from there began to invite various outstanding and not so prominent physicists. Outstanding physicists were reluctant to go into exile, so the bet was placed on the young school, which was founded immediately. The schools were NSU and the Physics and Music School at this NSU. By the way, in the Academy the tablets give the authorship of the FMS exclusively to Lavrentyev, but living witnesses of that history, who now live in America and publish their memoirs, claim that the author of the school was Budker, who “sold” the idea to Lavrentyev for some kind of yet another administrative concession.
It is known that two great people - Budker and Lavrentyev did not get along very well with each other, to say the least, and this is still reflected not only in the relations of people in Akademgorodok, but also in the writing of its history. Look at any academic exhibition taking place in the House of Scientists (DU), and you will easily see that there are almost no, say, photographs from the huge INP archive and generally little is said about the largest institute in our Academy of Sciences (about 3 thousand employees) , and the third taxpayer in the NSO. Not very fair, but that's how it is.
In a word, we owe the Institute, its achievements and its atmosphere to Budker. By the way, and production too. Once upon a time, the INP was called the most capitalist of all the institutes in the country - it could produce its products and sell them. Now it is called the most socialist - after all, all the money earned goes into a common pot and from it is distributed for salaries, contracts and, most importantly, conducting scientific experiments.
This is a very expensive matter. A change (12 hours) of operation of an accelerator with a detector can cost hundreds of thousands of rubles, and most of this money (from 92 to 75%) is earned by BINP employees. The BINP is the only institute in the world that earns money for fundamental physical research on its own. In other cases, such institutions are financed by the state, but here - you understand - if you wait for help from the state, then you won’t die for long.

How does INP earn money? Sales of magnetic accelerator systems to other countries wishing to build their own accelerators. We can proudly say that we are certainly one of the two or three best accelerator ring manufacturers in the world. We produce both vacuum systems and resonators. We produce industrial accelerator units that operate in dozens of areas outside our economy, helping to disinfect medical equipment, grain, food, purify air and wastewater, well, in general, everything that no one pays attention to here. BINP produces medical accelerators and X-ray units for x-raying people, say, at airports or medical institutions. If you look closely at the labels on these scanners, you will find that they are located not only at the Novosibirsk Tolmachevo Airport, but also very much in the capital Domodedovo. BINP makes dozens, if not hundreds of small orders for high-tech production or science all over the world. We produce accelerators and similar equipment for the USA, Japan, Europe, China, India... We built part of the LHC ring and were very successful. The share of Russian orders with us is traditionally low, and there is nothing we can do about it - the government does not give money, and local authorities or business owners simply do not have enough of it - usually the bill runs into millions of dollars. However, we must honestly admit that we also have ordinary Russian grants and contracts, and we are also happy about them, because the Institute always needs money.

3. A fragment of the accelerator, which is currently being produced by the BINP for the Brookhaven Laboratory (USA)

Our average salary is less than that of our neighbors, and its distribution does not always seem fair, but the majority of Iafists accept this, because they understand what they are working on and why they are refusing to increase their salaries. Each percentage placed in it means minus the days of operation of the installations. It's simple.
Yes, sometimes you have to stop them completely, and there have been such cases too. But, fortunately, they lasted only six months.
INP can afford to lead the construction of expensive luxury houses, as long as some of the apartments go to employees, send these employees on long business trips abroad, maintain one of the best ski bases in the country, where the “Russian Ski Track” is held annually (by the way, the base is now under threat of closure due to for another ridiculous construction project), maintain his own recreation center in Burmistrovo (“Razliv”), in general, he can afford a lot of things. And although every year there is talk that this is too wasteful, we are still holding on.

What about science at INP?
Science is more difficult. There are four main scientific directions of the BINP:
1. physics of elementary particles - FEC (i.e. what our world consists of at the very, very micro level)
2. physics of accelerators (i.e. devices with which you can get to this micro level (or is it better to say “nano”, following modern fashion? :))
3. plasma physics
4. physics related to synchrotron radiation.

There are several other areas at the BINP, in particular those related to nuclear and photonuclear physics, medical applications, radiophysics and many other smaller ones.

4. Dayton VEPP-3 installation. If it seems to you that this is a complete chaos of wires, then in general it’s in vain. Firstly, VEPP-3 is an installation where there is simply no space, and secondly, the shooting takes place from the side of the cable route (it is laid on top). Finally, thirdly, Dayton is one of those installations that are sometimes built into the structure of VEPP-3 and then removed, i.e. There is simply no point in creating global systems for “restoring order” here.

We have two constantly operating accelerators: VEPP-2000 (the abbreviation VEPP, which will often appear, means “colliding electron-positron beams”), on which two detectors operate - KMD and SND (cryogenic magnetic detector and spherical neutral detector) and VEPP -4M with KEDR detector. The VEPP-4M complex contains another accelerator - VEPP-3, where experiments related to SR are carried out (VEPP-4 also has SR, but these are new stations, they are still in their infancy, although they have been actively developing recently and one of the last candidate’s dissertations from SIshniks was defended precisely in this direction).

6. SI bunker VEPP-3, X-ray fluorescence elemental analysis station.

In addition, we have an FEL, which is directly designed to work with terahertz radiation for anyone from the outside, since the BINP has not yet come up with a “direct” purpose for it. By the way, after this excursion it became known that the head of the FEL, Nikolai Aleksandrovich Vinokurov, was elected corresponding member of the RAS.

We make our first stop here for clarification (based on tips from readers). What is an FEL or free electron laser? It’s not very easy to explain this, but we will assume that you know that in a conventional laser, radiation occurs like this: using some method, we heat (excite) the atoms of a substance to such an extent that they begin to emit. And since we select this radiation in a special way, falling into resonance with the energy (and therefore frequency) of the radiation, we get a laser. So in an FEL, the source of radiation is not an atom, but the electron beam itself. It is forced to pass by the so-called wiggler (undulator), where a lot of magnets force the beam to “twitch” from side to side in a sinusoid. At the same time, it emits the same synchrotron radiation, which can be collected into laser radiation. By changing the current strength in the wiggler magnets or the beam energy, we can change the laser frequency over a wide range, which is currently unattainable in any other way.

There are no other FEL installations in Russia. But they exist in the USA, such a laser is also being built in Germany (a joint project of France, Germany and our institute, the cost exceeds 1 billion euros.) In English, such a laser sounds like FEL - free electron laser.

8. Free electron laser electron gun

9. System for monitoring the level of water cooling resonators on FEL

10. FEL resonators

11. This and the next two frames show the FEL, viewed from below (it is suspended “from the ceiling”).

14. Oleg Aleksandrovich Shevchenko closes the door to the LSE hall. After the limit switch from the impacted radar protection door (concrete block on the right) is triggered, the laser can begin to operate.

15. FEL control room. On the table are glasses for protection against laser radiation.

16. One of the stations on the FEL. On the right you can see optical stands, on which there are pieces of paper with burnt paper (dark spots in the center). This is a trace of FEL laser radiation

17. Rare shot. An old beam oscilloscope in the FEL control room. There are few such oscilloscopes left at BINP, but if you look you can find them. Nearby (on the left) is a completely modern digital Tektronix, but what's interesting about it?

We have our own direction in the field of plasma physics, related to the confinement of plasma (where the thermonuclear reaction should take place) in open traps. Such traps are available only at the BINP and, although they will not allow the main task of the “thermonuclear” to be achieved - the creation of controlled thermonuclear fusion, they allow significant progress in the field of research into the parameters of this controlled thermonuclear fusion.

18. The AMBAL installation is an ambipolar adiabatic trap, currently not working.

19. AMBAL

What is being done in all these installations?

If we talk about the FEC, then the situation is complicated. All the achievements of the FCH in recent years are associated with accelerator-colliders of the LHC type (ELH-C, as the whole world calls it, and LHC - Large Hadron Collider, as only we call it). These are accelerators with enormous energy - about 7 TeV (1 tera- or 7 thousand gigaelectronvolts). Compared to them, VEPP-4 at its 4-5 GeV, which has been operating for almost half a century, is an old man, where research can be carried out in a limited range. And even more so VEPP-2000 with an energy of only about 1 GeV.

I will have to linger here a little and explain what GeV is and why it is a lot. If we take two electrodes and apply a potential difference of 1 volt across them, and then pass a charged particle between these electrodes, it will acquire an energy of 1 electron volt. It is separated from the more familiar joule by as many as 19 orders of magnitude: 1 eV = 1.6*10 -19 J.
To obtain an energy of 1 GeV, you need to create an accelerating voltage of 1 gigavolt over the electron's flight path (a giga is a billion volts, 10^9 or 1,000,000,000 volts). To obtain the energy of the LHC, it is necessary to create an accelerating voltage of 7 teravolts, and in this case it is necessary to expend about 180 MW of electrical power (this is the calculated consumption). Well, imagine further what is needed for this. Suffice it to say that the LHC (LHC) is powered by one of the French nuclear power plants located nearby.

21. The VEPP-2000 accelerator is a modernization of the previous VEPP-2M accelerator. The difference from the previous version is the higher energy (up to 1 GeV) and the implemented idea of so-called round beams (usually the beam looks more like a ribbon than anything else). Last year, the accelerator began operating after a long period of reconstruction.

23. Control room VEPP-2000.

24. Control room VEPP-2000. Above the table is a diagram of the accelerator complex.

25. Electron and positron booster BEP for VEPP-2000

How does the INP benefit from this area? The highest accuracy of their research. The fact is that life is structured in such a way that increasingly lighter particles contribute to the birth of heavier ones, and the more accurately we know their mass-energy, the better we know the contribution to the birth of even the Higgs boson. This is what the BINP does - it gets super-accurate results and studies various rare processes, the “catching” of which requires not just a device, but a lot of cunning and dexterity from researchers. In short, with brains, what else? And in this sense, all three BINP detectors stand out well - KMD, SND and KEDR (it has no decoding of the name)

26. SND is a spherical neutral detector that allows you to register particles that do not have a charge. The picture shows him close to final assembly and starting work.

The largest of our detectors is CEDAR. Recently, a series of experiments was completed on it, which made it possible to measure the mass of the so-called tau lepton, which is in every way analogous to an electron, only much heavier, and J/Psi - a particle, the first of the particles where the fourth-largest quark “works”. And I’ll explain again. As is known, there are six quarks in total - they have very beautiful and even exotic names by which the particles they belong to are called (say, “charm” or “strange” particles mean that they contain charm and strange quarks, respectively):

The names of quarks have nothing to do with the real properties of different things - an arbitrary fantasy of theorists. The names given in quotation marks are accepted Russian translations of the terms. My point is that a “lovely” quark cannot be called beautiful or beautiful - a terminological error. Such are the linguistic difficulties, although the t-quark is often simply called the top quark :)

So, all particles of the world familiar to us consist of the two lightest quarks; proof of the existence of the other four is the work of colliding beam accelerators and detectors. Proving the existence of the s-quark was not easy, it meant the correctness of several hypotheses at once, and the discovery of J/psi was an outstanding achievement, which immediately showed the enormous promise of the entire method of studying elementary particles, and at the same time opened the way for us to study the processes that took place in the world during the Great Big The explosion and what is happening now. The mass of the “gypsy” after the KEDR experiment was measured with an accuracy that is exceeded only by the measurement of the masses of an electron and a proton with a neutron, i.e. basic particles of the microworld. This is a fantastic result that both the detector and the accelerator can be proud of for a long time to come.

28. This is the KEDR detector. As you can see, it is now disassembled, this is a rare opportunity to see what it looks like from the inside. Systems are being repaired and modernized after a long period of work, which is usually called “experimental entry” and usually lasts several years.

29. This is the KEDR detector, top view.

31. Cryogenic system of the KEDR detector, tanks with liquid nitrogen used to cool the superconducting magnet of the KEDR detector (it is cooled to the temperature of liquid helium, pre-cooled to the temperature of liquid nitrogen.)

32. In the VEPP-4M ring

In the field of accelerator physics, the situation is better. BINP is one of the creators of colliders in general, i.e. We can confidently consider ourselves one of two institutes where this method was born almost simultaneously (with a difference of a few months). For the first time, we encountered matter and antimatter in such a way that it was possible to conduct experiments with them, rather than observing this very antimatter as something amazing that cannot be worked with. We are still proposing and trying to implement accelerator ideas that do not yet exist in the world, and our specialists sometimes stay in foreign centers ready to undertake their implementation (in our country this is expensive and time-consuming). We propose new designs of “factories” - powerful accelerators that can “give birth” to a huge number of events for each revolution of the beam. In a word, here, in the field of accelerator physics, the BINP can confidently claim to be a world-class Institute that has not lost its significance all these years.

We are building very few new installations and they take a long time to complete. For example, the VEPP-5 accelerator, which was planned to be the largest at the BINP, took so long to build that it became morally obsolete. Moreover, the created injector is so good (and even unique) that it would be wrong not to use it. The part of the ring that you see today is planned to be used not for VEPP-5, but for channels for transferring particles from the VEPP-5 forinjector to VEPP-2000 and VEPP-4.

33. The tunnel for the VEPP-5 ring is perhaps the largest structure of this type at the BINP today. Its size is such that a bus could travel here. The ring was never built due to lack of funds.

34. Fragment of the Forinjector - VEPP-3 channel in the VEPP-5 tunnel.

35. These are stands for the magnetic elements of the Forinjector bypass channel - VEPP2000 (the channels are still under construction today.)

36. Room of the LINAC (linear accelerator) of the VEPP-5 Foreinjector

37. This and the next frame show the magnetic elements of the Foreinjector

39. Linear accelerator of Forinjector VEPP-5.
The person on duty at the complex and the person responsible for visitors are waiting for the end of photography

40. The Forinjector's cooler storage device, where electrons and positrons from LINAC enter for further acceleration and changes in some beam parameters.

41. Elements of the magnetic system of the storage cooler. Quadrupole lens in this case.

42. Many guests of our Institute mistakenly believe that the 13th building, where the VEPP 3, 4, 5 accelerators are located, is very small. Only two floors. And they are wrong. This is the road down to the floors located underground (it’s easier to do rad protection this way)

Today, the INP is planning to create a so-called c-tau (tse-tau) factory, which could become the largest project in fundamental physics in Russia in recent decades (if the megaproject is supported by the Russian Government), the expected results will undoubtedly be at the level of the best in the world. The question, as always, is about money, which the Institute is unlikely to be able to earn on its own. It is one thing to maintain current installations and very slowly do new things, another thing is to compete with research laboratories that receive full support from their countries or even associations such as the EU.

In the field of plasma physics, the situation is somewhat more difficult. This direction has not been funded for decades, there has been a strong outflow of specialists abroad, and yet plasma physics in our country can also find something to brag about. In particular, it turned out that turbulence (vortices) of the plasma, which should destroy its stability, sometimes on the contrary , help keep it within specified boundaries.

43. Two main installations of plasma physics - GOL-3 (in the picture taken from the level of the crane beam of the building) and GDL (will be below)

44. Generators GOL-3 (corrugated open trap)

45. A fragment of the GOL-3 accelerator structure, the so-called mirror cell.

Why do we need an accelerator on plasma? It's simple - in the task of obtaining thermonuclear energy there are two main problems: confining the plasma in magnetic fields of a tricky structure (plasma is a cloud of charged particles that strive to push apart and spread out in different directions) and its rapid heating to thermonuclear temperatures (imagine - you are a teapot before You heat 100 degrees for several minutes, but here you need microseconds to millions of degrees). The BINP tried to solve both problems using accelerator technologies. Result? On modern TOKAMAKs, the plasma pressure to the field pressure that can be retained is a maximum of 10%, at the BINP in open traps - up to 60%. What does this mean? That in TOKAMAK it is impossible to carry out the deuterium + deuterium synthesis reaction; only very expensive tritium can be used there. In a GOL-type installation it would be possible to make do with deuterium.

46. It must be said that GOL-3 looks like something created either in the distant future, or simply brought by aliens. Usually it makes a completely futuristic impression on all visitors.

48. GOL-3

Now let's move on to another plasma installation at the BINP - GDT (gas dynamic trap). From the very beginning, this plasma trap was not focused on the thermonuclear reaction, it was built to study the behavior of plasma.

50. The GDL is a fairly small unit, so it fits into one frame entirely.

Plasma physicists also have their own dreams, they want to create a new installation - GDML (m - multi-mirror), its development began in 2010, well, no one knows when it will end. The crisis affects us in the most significant way - high-tech industries are the first to be cut, and with them our orders. If funding is available, the installation can be created in 4-6 years.

In the field of SI, we (I’m talking about Russia) lag behind the entire developed part of the planet, to be honest. There are a huge number of SR sources in the world, they are better and more powerful than ours. They carry out thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of work related to the study of everything from the behavior of biological molecules to research into solid state physics and chemistry. In fact, this is a powerful source of X-rays, which cannot be obtained in any other way, so all research related to the study of the structure of matter is SI.

However, life is such that in Russia there are only three SR sources, two of which were made here, and we helped launch one (one is located in Moscow, another in Zelenograd). And only one of them constantly works in experimental mode - this is the “good old” VEPP-3, which was built a thousand years ago. The fact is that it is not enough to build an accelerator for SR. It is also important to build equipment for SI stations, but this is something that is not available anywhere else. As a result, many researchers in our western regions prefer to send a representative “to do everything ready” rather than spend huge amounts of money on the creation and development of SI stations somewhere in the Moscow region.

53. The injector hall for VEPP-3 - POSITRON installation - one of the oldest installations of this type in the world

54. Injector hall for VEPP-3 - POSITRON installation, on the left (blue cylinder) - linear accelerator (LINAC), on the right - B4 synchrotron

55. In the VEPP-3 ring

56. This is a bird's eye view of the VEPP-4 complex, or more precisely the third floor of the “mezzanine”. Directly below are concrete blocks of radar protection, under them are POSITRON and VEPP-3, then there is a bluish room - the control room of the complex, from where the complex and the experiment are controlled.

57. “Chief” of VEPP-3, one of the oldest accelerator physicists at the INP and the country - Svyatoslav Igorevich Mishnev

At the INP, for almost 3000 people, there are only a little more than 400 scientific workers, including postgraduate students. And you all understand that it is not a research assistant standing at the machine, and the drawings for the new accelerating rings are not made by graduate students or students either. The BINP has a large number of engineering and technical workers, which includes a huge design department, technologists, electricians, radio engineers, and... dozens of other specialties. We have a large number of workers (about 600 people), mechanics, laboratory assistants, radio laboratory assistants and hundreds of other specialties, which sometimes I don’t even know about, because no one is particularly interested in this. By the way, INP is one of those rare enterprises in the country that annually holds a competition for young workers - turners and milling operators.

58.

62. Production at the Institute of Nuclear Physics, one of the workshops. The equipment is mostly outdated, modern machines are located in workshops that we have not been to, located in Chemy (there is such a place in Novosibirsk, next to the so-called Research Institute of Systems). This workshop also has CNC machines, they just weren’t included in the shot (this is a response to some comments on blogs.)

We are Iafists, we are a single organism, and this is the main thing at our Institute. Although it is very important, of course, that physicists lead the entire technological process. They do not always understand the details and intricacies of working with materials, but they know how everything should end and remember that a small failure somewhere on a worker’s machine will lead to a multimillion-dollar installation somewhere in our country, or in the world. And therefore, some green student may not even understand the engineer’s explanations, but when asked “can this be accepted,” he will shake his head negatively, remembering exactly that he needs an accuracy of five microns on the basis of a meter, otherwise his installation is screwed. And then the task of technologists and engineers is to figure out how he, the villain, can meet his unthinkable demands, which go against everything that we usually do. But they invent and provide, and invest an incredible amount of intelligence and ingenuity.

63. The puzzled person responsible for the electrical equipment of the VEPP-4M complex, Alexander Ivanovich Zhmaka.

64. This ominous shot was filmed simply in one of the buildings of the Institute, in the same one where VEPP-3, VEPP-4 and the VEPP-5 forinjector are located. And it simply means the fact that the accelerator is working and poses some danger.

65. And this one means that the service responsible for the safety of our work is not asleep. These are individual film dosimeters of various types.

67. The world's first collider, built in 1963 to study the possibilities of using them in particle physics experiments. VEP-1 is the only collider in history in which beams circulated and collided in a vertical plane.

68. Underground passages between the buildings of the institute

Thanks to Elena Elk for organizing the photography and detailed stories about the installations.

I had a chance to visit the world-famous INP named after. G.I.Budkera SB RAS. What I saw there, I can only show; a detailed story about the installations and about the institute itself was compiled by Elena Valerievna Starostina, a researcher at the institute.

(Total 68 photos)

Original text taken from here .
It is generally difficult to talk about INP in a nutshell for many reasons. First of all, because our Institute does not fit into the usual standards. This is not exactly an academic institute working on fundamental science, because it has its own production, which is quite similar to a mediocre plant, but in modern times a good plant. And at this plant they don’t make nails with cans, but they have technologies that simply don’t exist anywhere in Russia. Modern technologies in the most precise sense of the word, and not in the “modern for the Soviet Union of the 80s.” And this plant is our own, and not one where the owners are “out there somewhere” and we are just collecting products in a pile.
So this is by no means an academic Institute.

But not production either. What kind of production is this if the Institute considers the main product to be the most fundamental result, and all this wonderful technological filling and production is just a way to get this result?

So this is a multidisciplinary institute?
Yes. And much, much more...

So, INP SB RAS named after. G.I.Budkera or simply the Institute of Nuclear Physics.
It was founded in 1958 by Gersh Itskovich Budker, whose name at the Institute was Andrei Mikhailovich, God knows why. No, of course, he was a Jew, Jewish names were not welcomed in the USSR - this is all clear. But I was not able to find out why Andrei Mikhailovich, and not Nikolai Semenovich, say.
By the way, if you hear something like “Andrei Mikhailovich said...” at the INP, it means Budker said.
He is the founder of the Institute and probably, if not for him, and if not for Siberia, we would never have had such developed accelerator physics. The fact is that Budker worked for Kurchatov, and according to rumors, it was simply cramped for him there. And they would never have allowed it to “swing” the way it did in Russia, where new institutions were just being created and new directions were opening up. And they wouldn’t have given him the Institute right away in Moscow at that age. First, they would have made him look bad at the position of head of the lab, then the deputy director, in general, you see, he would have lost his temper and left.

Budker went to Novosibirsk and from there began to invite various outstanding and not so prominent physicists. Outstanding physicists were reluctant to go into exile, so the bet was placed on the young school, which was founded immediately. The schools were NSU and the Physics and Music School at this NSU. By the way, in the Academy the tablets give the authorship of the FMS exclusively to Lavrentyev, but living witnesses of that history, who now live in America and publish their memoirs, claim that the author of the school was Budker, who “sold” the idea to Lavrentyev for some kind of yet another administrative concession.
It is known that two great people - Budker and Lavrentyev did not get along very well with each other, to say the least, and this is still reflected not only in the relations of people in Akademgorodok, but also in the writing of its history. Look at any academic exhibition taking place in the House of Scientists (DU), and you will easily see that there are almost no, say, photographs from the huge INP archive and generally little is said about the largest institute in our Academy of Sciences (about 3 thousand employees) , and the third taxpayer in the NSO. Not very fair, but that's how it is.
In a word, we owe the Institute, its achievements and its atmosphere to Budker. By the way, and production too. Once upon a time, the INP was called the most capitalist of all the institutes in the country - it could produce its products and sell them. Now it is called the most socialist - after all, all the money earned goes into a common pot and from it is distributed for salaries, contracts and, most importantly, conducting scientific experiments.
This is a very expensive matter. A change (12 hours) of operation of an accelerator with a detector can cost hundreds of thousands of rubles, and most of this money (from 92 to 75%) is earned by BINP employees. The BINP is the only institute in the world that earns money for fundamental physical research on its own. In other cases, such institutions are funded by the state, but in our country - you understand - if you wait for help from the state, you won’t die for long.

How does INP earn money? Sales of magnetic accelerator systems to other countries wishing to build their own accelerators. We can proudly say that we are certainly one of the two or three best accelerator ring manufacturers in the world. We produce both vacuum systems and resonators. We produce industrial accelerator units that operate in dozens of areas outside our economy, helping to disinfect medical equipment, grain, food, purify air and wastewater, well, in general, everything that no one pays attention to here. BINP produces medical accelerators and X-ray units for x-raying people, say, at airports or medical institutions. If you look closely at the labels on these scanners, you will find that they are located not only at the Novosibirsk Tolmachevo Airport, but also very much in the capital Domodedovo. BINP makes dozens, if not hundreds of small orders for high-tech production or science all over the world. We produce accelerators and similar equipment for the USA, Japan, Europe, China, India... We built part of the LHC ring and were very successful. The share of Russian orders here is traditionally low, and there is nothing we can do about it - the government does not give money, and local authorities or business owners simply do not have enough of it - usually the bill runs into millions of dollars. However, we must honestly admit that we also have ordinary Russian grants and contracts, and we are also happy about them, because the Institute always needs money.

3. A fragment of the accelerator, which is currently being produced by the Nuclear Physics Institute for the Brookhaven Laboratory (USA)

What about science at INP?
Science is more difficult. There are four main scientific directions of the BINP:
1. physics of elementary particles - FEP (i.e. what our world consists of at the very, very micro level)
2. physics of accelerators (i.e. devices with the help of which one can reach this microlevel (or is it better to say “nano”, following modern fashion? :))
3. plasma physics
4. physics related to synchrotron radiation.

There are several other areas at the BINP, in particular those related to nuclear and photonuclear physics, medical applications, radiophysics and many other smaller ones.

4. Installation Dayton VEPP-3. If it seems to you that this is a complete chaos of wires, then in general it’s in vain. Firstly, VEPP-3 is an installation where there is simply no space, and secondly, the shooting takes place from the side of the cable route (it is laid on top). Finally, thirdly, Dayton is one of those installations that are sometimes built into the structure of VEPP-3 and then removed, i.e. There is simply no point in creating global systems for “restoring order” here.

We have two constantly operating accelerators: VEPP-2000 (the abbreviation VEPP, which will often be encountered, means “colliding electron-positron beams”), on which two detectors operate - KMD and SND (cryogenic magnetic detector and spherical neutral detector) and VEPP -4M with KEDR detector. The VEPP-4M complex contains another accelerator - VEPP-3, where experiments related to SR are carried out (VEPP-4 also has SR, but these are new stations, they are still in their infancy, although they have been actively developing recently and one of the last candidate’s dissertations from SIshniks was defended precisely in this direction).

5. SI bunker VEPP-3, X-ray fluorescence elemental analysis station.

6. SI bunker VEPP-3, X-ray fluorescence elemental analysis station.

8. Free electron laser electron gun

9. System for monitoring the level of water cooling the resonators on FEL

10. FEL resonators

11. This and the next two frames show the FEL, viewed from below (it is suspended “from the ceiling”).

14. Oleg Aleksandrovich Shevchenko closes the door to the LSE hall. After the limit switch from the impacted radar protection door (concrete block on the right) is triggered, the laser can begin to operate.

15. FEL control room. On the table are glasses for protection against laser radiation.

16. One of the stations on the FEL. On the right you can see optical stands, on which there are pieces of paper with burnt paper (dark spots in the center). This is a trace of FEL laser radiation

17. Rare shot. An old beam oscilloscope in the FEL control room. There are few such oscilloscopes left at BINP, but if you look you can find them. Nearby (on the left) is a completely modern digital Tektronix, but what's interesting about it?

18. The AMBAL installation is an ambipolar adiabatic trap, currently not working.

What is being done in all these installations?

If we talk about the FEC, then the situation is complicated. All the achievements of the FCH in recent years are associated with accelerator-colliders of the LHC type (ELH-C, as the whole world calls it, and LHC - Large Hadron Collider, as only we call it). These are accelerators with enormous energy – about 200 GeV (gigaelectronvolt). Compared to them, VEPP-4 at its 4-5 GeV, which has been operating for almost half a century, is an old man, where it is possible to conduct research in a limited range. And even more so VEPP-2000 with an energy of only about 1 GeV.

I will have to linger here a little and explain what GeV is and why it is a lot. If we take two electrodes and apply a potential difference of 1 volt across them, and then pass a charged particle between these electrodes, it will acquire an energy of 1 electron volt. It is separated from the more familiar joule by as many as 19 orders of magnitude: 1 eV = 1.6*10 -19 J.
To obtain an energy of 1 GeV, it is necessary to create an accelerating voltage of 1 gigavolt over the flight path of the electron. To get the energy from the LHC, you have to create a voltage of 200 gigavolts (a giga is a billion volts, 10 9 or 1,000,000,000 volts). Well, imagine further what is needed for this. Suffice it to say that the LHC (LHC) is powered by one of the French nuclear power plants located nearby.

21. VEPP-2000 accelerator – modernization of the previous VEPP-2M accelerator. The difference from the previous version is the higher energy (up to 1 GeV) and the implemented idea of so-called round beams (usually the beam looks more like a ribbon than anything else). Last year, the accelerator began operating after a long period of reconstruction.

23. Control room VEPP-2000.

24. Control room VEPP-2000. Above the table is a diagram of the accelerator complex.

25. Booster of electrons and positrons BEP for VEPP-2000

26. SND is a spherical neutral detector that allows you to register particles that do not have a charge. The picture shows him close to final assembly and starting work.

The largest of our detectors is KEDR. Recently, a series of experiments was completed on it, which made it possible to measure the mass of the so-called tau lepton, which is in every way analogous to an electron, only much heavier, and the J/Psi particle, the first of the particles where the fourth-largest quark “works.” And I’ll explain again. As is known, there are six quarks in total - they have very beautiful and even exotic names by which the particles they belong to are called (say, “charm” or “strange” particles mean that they contain charm and strange quarks, respectively):

The names of quarks have nothing to do with the real properties of different things - an arbitrary fantasy of theorists. The names given in quotation marks are accepted Russian translations of the terms. My point is that a “pretty” quark cannot be called beautiful or beautiful - a terminological error. Such are the linguistic difficulties, although the t-quark is often simply called the top quark :)

28. This is the KEDR detector. As you can see, it is now disassembled, this is a rare opportunity to see what it looks like from the inside. Systems are being repaired and modernized after a long period of work, which is usually called “experimental entry” and usually lasts several years.

29. This is the KEDR detector, top view.

31. Cryogenic system of the KEDR detector, tanks with liquid nitrogen used to cool the superconducting magnet of the KEDR detector (it is cooled to the temperature of liquid helium, pre-cooled to the temperature of liquid nitrogen.)

32. In the VEPP-4M ring

33. The tunnel for the VEPP-5 ring is perhaps the largest structure of this type at the BINP today. Its size is such that a bus could travel here. The ring was never built due to lack of funds.

34. Fragment of the Forinjector - VEPP-3 channel in the VEPP-5 tunnel.

35. These are stands for the magnetic elements of the Forinjector bypass channel - VEPP2000 (the channels are still under construction today.)

36. Room of the LINAC (linear accelerator) of the VEPP-5 Foreinjector

37. This and the next frame show the magnetic elements of the Foreinjector

39. Linear accelerator of Forinjector VEPP-5. The person on duty at the complex and the person responsible for visitors are waiting for the end of photography

40. Forinjector cooler storage, where electrons and positrons from LINAC enter for further acceleration and changing some beam parameters.

41. Elements of the magnetic system of the storage cooler. Quadrupole lens in this case.

42. Many guests of our Institute mistakenly believe that the 13th building, where the VEPP3, 4, 5 accelerators are located, is very small. Only two floors. And they are wrong. This is the road down to the floors located underground (it’s easier to do rad protection this way)

43. Two main installations of plasma physics - GOL-3 (in the picture taken from the level of the crane beam of the building) and GDL (will be below)

44. Generators GOL-3 (corrugated open trap)

45. Fragment of the GOL-3 accelerator structure, the so-called mirror cell.

Why do we need an accelerator on plasma? It's simple - in the task of obtaining thermonuclear energy there are two main problems: confining the plasma in magnetic fields of a tricky structure (plasma is a cloud of charged particles that strive to push apart and spread out in different directions) and its rapid heating to thermonuclear temperatures (imagine - you are a teapot before You heat 100 degrees for several minutes, but here you need microseconds to millions of degrees). The BINP tried to solve both problems using accelerator technologies. Result? On modern TOKAMAKs, the plasma pressure to the field pressure that can be held is a maximum of 10%, at the BINP in open traps - up to 60%. What does this mean? That in TOKAMAK it is impossible to carry out the deuterium + deuterium synthesis reaction; only very expensive tritium can be used there. In a GOL-type installation it would be possible to make do with deuterium.

46. It must be said that GOL-3 looks like something created either in the distant future, or simply brought by aliens. Usually it makes a completely futuristic impression on all visitors.

Now let's move on to another plasma installation at the BINP - the GDT (gas dynamic trap). From the very beginning, this plasma trap was not focused on the thermonuclear reaction, it was built to study the behavior of plasma.

50. GDL is a rather small installation, so it fits into one frame entirely.

Plasma physicists also have their own dreams, they want to create a new installation - GDML (m - multi-mirror), its development began in 2010, but no one knows when it will end. The crisis affects us in the most significant way - high-tech industries are the first to be cut, and with them our orders. If funding is available, the installation can be created in 4-6 years.

55. In the VEPP-3 ring

56. This is a bird's eye view of the VEPP-4 complex, or more precisely the third floor of the “mezzanine”. Directly below are concrete blocks of radar protection, under them are POSITRON and VEPP-3, then there is a bluish room - the control room of the complex, from where the complex and the experiment are controlled.

57. “Chief” of VEPP-3, one of the oldest accelerator physicists at the BINP and the country – Svyatoslav Igorevich Mishnev

62. BINP production, one of the workshops. The equipment is mostly outdated, modern machines are located in workshops that we have not been to, located in Chemy (there is such a place in Novosibirsk, next to the so-called Research Institute of Systems). This workshop also has CNC machines, they just weren’t included in the shot (this is a response to some comments on blogs.)

63. The puzzled person responsible for the electrical equipment of the VEPP-4M complex, Alexander Ivanovich Zhmaka.

64. This ominous shot was filmed simply in one of the buildings of the Institute, in the same one where VEPP-3, VEPP-4 and the VEPP-5 forinjector are located. And it simply means the fact that the accelerator is working and poses some danger.

67. The world's first collider, built in 1963 to study the possibilities of using them in experiments in particle physics. VEP-1 is the only collider in history in which beams circulated and collided in a vertical plane.

68. Underground passages between the buildings of the institute

Thanks to Elena Elk for organizing the photography and detailed stories about the installations.

June 6th, 2016

60 shots | 12.02.2016

In February, as part of the days of science in the Novosibirsk Akademgorodok, I went on an excursion to the Institute of Nuclear Physics. Kilometers of underground passages, particle accelerators, lasers, plasma generators and other wonders of science in this report.

Institute of Nuclear Physics named after. G.I. Budkera (BINP SB RAS) is the largest academic institute in the country, one of the world's leading centers in the field of high-energy and accelerator physics, plasma physics and controlled thermonuclear fusion. The institute conducts large-scale experiments in particle physics, develops modern accelerators, intense sources of synchrotron radiation and free electron lasers. In most of its areas, the Institute is the only one in Russia.

The first devices that a visitor encounters right in the corridor of the institute are a resonator and a bending magnet with VEPP-2M. Today they are museum exhibits.
This is what the resonator looks like. Essentially it is a particle accelerator.

The installation with colliding electron-positron beams VEPP-2M began operating in 1974. Until 1990, it was modernized several times, the injection part was improved and new detectors were installed for conducting high-energy physics experiments.

A rotating magnet that deflects a beam of elementary particles to pass along a ring.

VEPP-2M is one of the first colliders in the world. The author of the innovative idea to collide colliding beams of elementary particles was the first director of the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the SB RAS - G. I. Budker. This idea became a revolution in high-energy physics and allowed experiments to reach a fundamentally new level. Now this principle is used all over the world, including at the Large Hadron Collider.

The next installation is the VEPP-2000 accelerator complex.

The VEPP-2000 collider is a modern installation with colliding electron-positron beams, built at the BINP SB RAS in the early 2000s instead of the VEPP-2M ring, which successfully completed its physical program. The new storage ring has a wider energy range from 160 to 1000 MeV in the beam, and an order of magnitude higher luminosity, that is, the number of interesting events per unit time.

High luminosity is achieved using the original concept of round colliding beams, first proposed at the BINP SB RAS and applied at VEPP-2000. KMD-3 and SND detectors are located at the meeting points of the beams. They record various processes that occur during the annihilation of an electron with its antiparticle - a positron, such as the birth of light mesons or nucleon-antinucleon pairs.

The creation of VEPP-2000 using a number of advanced solutions in the magnetic system and beam diagnostic system in 2012 was awarded the prestigious Prize in the field of accelerator physics. Wexler.

Control room VEPP-2000. The installation is controlled from here.

In addition to computer equipment, such instrument cabinets are also used to monitor and control the installation.

Everything is clearly visible here, with light bulbs.

After walking at least a kilometer through the corridors of the institute, we arrived at the synchrotron radiation station.

Synchrotron radiation (SR) occurs when high-energy electrons move in a magnetic field in accelerators.

Radiation has a number of unique properties and can be used for research of matter and for technological purposes.

The properties of SR are most clearly manifested in the X-ray range of the spectrum; accelerators-sources of SR are the brightest sources of X-ray radiation.

In addition to purely scientific research, SI is also used for applied problems. For example, the development of new electrode materials for lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles or new explosives.

In Russia there are two centers for the use of SR - the Kurchatov SR Source (KISS) and the Siberian Center for Synchrotron and Terahertz Radiation (SCST) of the Institute of Nuclear Physics SB RAS. The Siberian Center uses SR beams from the VEPP-3 storage ring and from the VEPP-4 electron-positron collider.

This yellow chamber is the "Explosion" station. It studies the detonation of explosives.

The center has a developed instrumentation base for sample preparation and related research.The center employs about 50 scientific groups from institutes of the Siberian Scientific Center and from Siberian universities.

The installation is very densely loaded with experiments. Work does not stop here even at night.

We move to another building. A room with an iron door and the sign “Do not enter radiation” - this is our place.

Here is a prototype of an accelerator source of epithermal neutrons suitable for the widespread introduction of boron neutron capture therapy (BNCT) into clinical practice. Simply put, this device is for fighting cancer.

A boron-containing solution is injected into the human blood, and boron accumulates in cancer cells. Then the tumor is irradiated with a stream of epithermal neutrons, boron nuclei absorb the neutrons, and nuclear reactions with high energy release occur, as a result of which the diseased cells die.

The BNCT technique has been tested in nuclear reactors that have been used as a source of neutrons, but the introduction of BNCT into clinical practice in them is difficult. Charged particle accelerators are more suitable for these purposes because they are compact, safe and provide better quality of the neutron beam.

Below are some more pictures from this laboratory.

One gets the complete impression that he has entered the workshop of a large factory like .

Complex and unique scientific equipment is developed and manufactured here.

Separately, it should be noted the underground passages of the institute. I don’t know exactly how long their total length is, but I think a couple of metro stations could easily fit here. It is very easy for an ignorant person to get lost in them, but employees can get from them to almost any place in a huge institution.

Well, we ended up at the “Corrugated Trap” installation (GOL-3). It belongs to the class of open traps for confining subthermonuclear plasma in an external magnetic field.Plasma heating at the installation is carried out by injection of relativistic electron beams into a previously created deuterium plasma.

The GOL-3 installation consists of three parts: the U-2 accelerator, the main solenoid and the output unit. U-2 pulls electrons from the explosive emission cathode and accelerates them in a strip diode to an energy of the order of 1 MeV. The created powerful relativistic beam is compressed and injected into the main solenoid, where a high level of microturbulence arises in the deuterium plasma and the beam loses up to 40% of its energy, transferring it to plasma electrons.

At the bottom of the unit is the main solenoid and output assembly.

And on the top is the U-2 electron beam generator.

The facility conducts experiments on the physics of plasma confinement in open magnetic systems, the physics of collective interaction of electron beams with plasma, the interaction of powerful plasma flows with materials, as well as the development of plasma technologies for scientific research.

The idea of multi-mirror plasma confinement was proposed in 1971 by G. I. Budker, V. V. Mirnov and D. D. Ryutov. A multi-mirror trap is a set of connected mirror cells that form a corrugated magnetic field.

In such a system, charged particles are divided into two groups: those captured in single mirror cells and those in transit, caught in the loss cone of a single mirror cell.

The installation is large and, of course, only the scientists working here know about all its components and parts.

Laser installation GOS-1001.

The mirror included in the installation has a reflection coefficient close to 100%. Otherwise it will heat up and burst.

The last one on the excursion, but perhaps the most impressive, was the Gas Dynamic Trap (GDT). To me, a person far from science, it reminded me of some kind of spaceship in an assembly shop.

The GDL installation, created at the Novosibirsk Institute of Nuclear Physics in 1986, belongs to the class of open traps and serves to contain plasma in a magnetic field. Experiments on the topic of controlled thermonuclear fusion (CTF) are conducted here.

An important problem of CTS based on open traps is thermal insulation of plasma from the end wall. The fact is that in open traps, unlike closed systems such as a tokamak or stellarator, plasma flows out of the trap and enters the plasma receivers. In this case, cold electrons emitted under the action of a plasma flow from the surface of the plasma receiver can penetrate back into the trap and greatly cool the plasma.

In experiments to study the longitudinal confinement of plasma at the GDT installation, it was experimentally shown that the expanding magnetic field behind the plug in front of the plasma collector in the end expander tanks prevents the penetration of cold electrons into the trap and effectively thermally insulates the plasma from the end wall.

As part of the GDT experimental program, constant work is being carried out to increase plasma stability, reduce and suppress longitudinal losses of plasma and energy from the trap, study the behavior of plasma under various operating conditions of the facility, and increase the temperature of the target plasma and the density of fast particles. The GDL installation is equipped with the most modern plasma diagnostic tools. Most of them were developed at the BINP and are even supplied under contracts to other plasma laboratories, including foreign ones.

Lasers are everywhere at the Nuclear Physics Institute and here too.

This was the excursion.

I would like to express my gratitude to the Council of Young Scientists of the BINP SB RAS for organizing the excursion and to all the BINP employees who showed and told us what and how the institute is currently doing. I would like to express special gratitude to Alla Skovorodina, public relations specialist at the Institute of Nuclear Physics SB RAS, who directly participated in the work on the text of this report. Also thanks to my friend Ivan

Scientists from the Institute of Nuclear Physics named after. G.I. Budker SB RAS, together with their Russian and foreign colleagues, are working on the creation of the world's first thermonuclear reactor ITER, which will be a major step towards the thermonuclear energy of the future. The main element of ITER is a tokamak, a closed magnetic installation for confining plasma. Today, the BINP is developing a new format for an alternative version of magnetic traps - open-type installations. The new RESIN screw trap should theoretically be on par with top-end tokamaks in terms of plasma retention. Experiments that should confirm the scientists’ calculations will begin at the end of 2017.

Scientists began to think seriously about controlled thermonuclear fusion after testing the first hydrogen bomb, and the first task was to “tame” high-temperature plasma. In other words, to achieve certain parameters of temperature, density and retention time.

If on the Sun plasma is held by a gravitational field, then on Earth they decided to work with a magnetic one: Soviet physicists A.D. Sakharov and I.E. Tamm in 1950 put forward the idea of creating a thermonuclear reactor based on the principle of magnetic confinement and proposed the concept of a closed magnetic trap. This is how it appeared tokamak– a toroidal chamber with magnetic coils, or, in simple terms, a “donut” with current. Work on the creation of tokamaks was headed by L.A. Artsimovich, head of the Soviet program for controlled thermonuclear fusion since 1951.

Several configurations of “closed” traps were developed, but it was on the T-3 tokamak at the Moscow Kurchatov Institute that the first results, stunning for that time, were obtained - plasma with a temperature of over 10 million degrees Celsius. These results were reported in Novosibirsk at the International Conference on Controlled Thermonuclear Fusion in 1968, and tokamaks have since become the basis of the world thermonuclear program.

However, it is impossible to say that it was the tokamaks that “won” as long as there are no industrial thermonuclear stations. Today they are actively researching and launching stellators, proposed back in 1951 by the American L. Spitzer, which also belong to closed magnetic traps, as well as open-type traps.

Open magnetic plasma traps are an alternative solution. In these devices, simple in geometry, the plasma is held in a certain “longitudinal” volume, and various methods are used to prevent its leakage along the magnetic field lines, such as magnetic “plugs” and special expanders. The concept of an open magnetic trap was proposed in 1953 independently by two scientists - G. I. Budker (USSR) and R. Post (USA). Six years later, the validity of this idea was confirmed in the experiment of S. N. Rodionov, an employee of the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences, which had just been created in the Novosibirsk Academic Town. Since then, the BINP has been a leader in the design, construction and experiments with open traps.

Of course, the modern installations of Novosibirsk scientists are experimental, i.e. small, pulsed. But theoretically, this type of open traps is promising for use in an industrial thermonuclear reactor, since they have a number of potential advantages compared to closed ones: a simpler engineering solution, greater efficiency in using magnetic field energy, i.e. higher efficiency, and many of these devices can operate in stationary mode.

Today, a group of physicists from the BINP plasma laboratories is working on a fresh idea: to use a magnetic field with helical symmetry to suppress longitudinal plasma losses from an open trap, which makes it possible to control the rotation of the plasma. To test this concept, an experimental setup called RESIN ( Spiral Magnetic Open Trap).

A researcher at the BINP SB RAS, Ph.D., spoke about what an open screw trap is, how it differs from its “progenitors,” and what results scientists expect from future experiments. Anton Sudnikov.

“The global idea is to take the next step in studying plasma confinement and improving the configuration of open traps. This may seem like a step aside - because the whole world today is working with closed configuration traps. But this is still the same direction - plasma physics, and we want to experimentally prove the advantages of open forms.

In open traps, the magnetic field lines are not closed, and the plasma is kept in the middle. And at the ends of the installations, along the power lines, plasma can flow out - our task is to reduce this flow.

To reduce losses, magnetic plugs are installed, i.e. dramatically increase the strength of the magnetic field at the ends of the device. In a gas-dynamic GDL trap, in this way it is possible to greatly narrow the “necks” of the bottle from which the plasma flows, but losses cannot be completely avoided.

In the GOL corrugated trap, on each side there is not one magnetic plug, as in the GDL, but several, depending on the configuration (for example, in the already disassembled GOL-3 there were about 50 plugs, and in the GOL-NB under construction there were 14 at each end) , due to which the plasma does not just flow through a smooth pipe, but, as it were, rubs against the corrugation of the magnetic field. Due to the friction force, the flow speed is lower than supersonic, which means there will be fewer losses. Since the distance between the plugs is rigidly specified, they cannot be made infinitely close, but the length of these multi-mirror sections can be increased, which improves the plasma confinement parameters.

To reduce plasma outflows, such multi-mirror sections should literally be moved towards the center. In this case, the plasma itself will “stand”, and magnetic plugs will “fly” along it, creating a friction force and dragging the matter along with it. The idea of moving plugs arose simultaneously with the idea of a multi-cork trap itself. But at that time the task was considered impossible and unprofitable, because to create such a running field, incredible power was needed.

The idea to deceive matter, to create such a configuration of a stationary magnetic field so that the plasma “seems” that it is moving towards the center, arose at the end of 2012. As is known, plasma in an open trap always rotates, and there are problems when it needs to be purposefully rotated. The only question is whether this rotation can be used for something else.

The idea was to create a magnetic field in the form of a screw. Imagine a meat grinder screw that rotates the chopped meat in the desired direction. In our case, in a similar way, a screw thread of the field is created on both sides of the central compartment with plasma, but at the same time it is different - with a right and left screw. On the one hand, the magnetic field drags the plasma to the left, on the other – to the right. So both of these end sections pump the plasma back. Of course, it is impossible to completely get rid of losses in this case - when the plasma flow weakens, the particles do not even collide with each other. But if we managed to make the flow so rare, it means that we have won by an order of magnitude, or even two, in terms of retention parameters.

This concept makes it possible to create a facility whose characteristics can be comparable to current top-end tokamaks. The only difficulty is that this idea is still theoretical. But already in the fall of 2017, we finish assembling the RESIN installation and a new stage begins - experimental.

For our unique experiment, not much is needed: one screw magnetic plug, a node where the plasma is created, and its receiver, as well as an expander that pulls the substance into the magnetic field. We are currently working on creating a plasma source with strictly defined characteristics so that our theoretical calculations can be confirmed by experiment.

If it can be proven that, despite the technical difficulties, the screw form of an open magnetic trap provides a significant gain, then our screw sections will be built into the next generation devices, which are at the BINP. We can already see the path we want to take, the road map of our work, as well as the practical applications of our technology.

Screw traps can be used as neutron sources to study the behavior of materials in contact with plasma, to create subcritical (unable to independently maintain a nuclear reaction) reactors, but primarily for the construction of “conventional” nuclear power plants. Some configurations of helical traps increase plasma flow speeds up to 100 km/sec, which is a necessary condition for spacecraft engines transporting satellites from geosynchronous orbit to, for example, the orbit of the Moon.

After one or two generations of open traps, it will be possible to talk about the creation of full-fledged reactors, moreover, operating on tritium-free fuels, for example, using the deuterium-deuterium fusion reaction. Tokamaks work with the deuterium-tritium reaction, which creates a serious problem of radioactive neutron flux. That is why so much attention in the ITER project is paid to the creation of ultra-strong materials and powerful bioprotection. The fusion reaction of two deuterium atoms produces fewer neutrons, with which energy is lost, and is accompanied by less radioactivity.

The advantage of the thermonuclear deuterium-tritium fusion reaction is that humanity is already producing plasma with its help. To make another, more energetically favorable reaction possible, much higher temperatures, densities and plasma confinement times are required, but such technologies have not yet been created.

However, it is also not worth talking about neutron-free reactors as a distant future. In an open trap with improved plasma confinement, it is theoretically possible to achieve the parameters necessary for the deuterium-deuterium reaction, while it has been experimentally proven that there are serious limitations for this in tokamaks.

Naturally, our model still needs to be tested, optimized, and a lot of development work is required. But it is already clear that this is the beginning of an interesting scientific story, at the end of which we expect results that may turn out to be very important for the thermonuclear energy of the future.”

Prepared by Tatyana Morozova, editor L. Ovchinnikova

The work was supported by the Russian Science Foundation grant 14-50-00080 “Development of the research and technological potential of the Institute of Nuclear Physics SB RAS in the field of accelerator physics, elementary particle physics and controlled thermonuclear fusion for science and society”