Jubilees

Viktor Matveevich Grebenyuk turns 80

28 April marks the 80th anniversary of the senior researcher of the Laboratory of Nuclear Problems V.M.GREBENYUK.

Viktor Matveevich is a Moscow native, he was born in the distant military year of 1943 in the centre of Moscow on Gorky Street. His father was a military doctor, so Vitya spent his childhood and school years not so much in Moscow as in the Far East and in Georgian city Kutaisi. Vitya entered Moscow School No.170 in 1950, later fate brought him to Russian School No.1 in Kutaisi, from where he returned to Moscow in 1957, where he graduated from his native school. Before the war, near the school on Nemirovich-Danchenko Street a "house of artists" was built, whose children studied at the same school. Therefore, it is not surprising that the Vertinsky sisters, Andrey Mironov, Seva Abdulov and other future well-known artists studied at this school at the same time as Vitya.

After school, Viktor entered the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute and graduated it in 1967. Viktor was assigned to TsAGI, yet he was sent to JINR for practice and graduation work. After having defended his diploma at DLNP, Viktor went to the Ministry of Aviation to refuse TsAGI and was employed at DLNP in Yu.K.Akimov's sector as a senior laboratory assistant with a higher education. Both the new job and the city were to his liking.

The development of high-speed electronic units for experiments on accelerators attracted the young employee and it is not surprising that he was soon transferred to the position of engineer. The high-speed electronic units for time measurements developed by him have widely been used in physical experiments both in JINR and Member States. With his decisive contribution, a system of high-speed logical units was developed in the CAMAC standard for multichannel facilities with ESL logical connection levels.

V.M. had to work hard at many accelerators: the synchrocyclotron and the phasotron of DLNP, at IHEP, in Julich (Germany), at a powerful pulsed accelerator in Tomsk, as well as at the reactor in Grenoble, where he took part in an experiment with ultracold neutrons.

At the DLNP accelerator, he developed a five-channel high-speed oscilloscope for the research of rare processes and a digitizer for measuring the lifetime of a positive muon - this result has been in Rosenfeld's tables for 12 years. In the course of the work, the energy spectra and asymmetries of the emission of charged particles during the capture of negative muons by nuclei were measured and the interaction of pions with nuclei at energies below the delta resonance was studied.

For experiments at the IHEP accelerator in Protvino, a fast processor for selecting events by multiplicity for the LSI facility was developed and manufactured, systems for generating a trigger for the MIS and RISK experiments were developed, a system of space trigger and time reference of drift chambers for the muon spectrometer of the neutrino detector was developed.

In 1979, based on the results of these papers, V.M.Grebenyuk defended his dissertation for the degree of candidate of technical sciences.

Since the beginning of the 2000s, V.M.'s scientific interests have been the development of detectors and electronics for space experiments and testing of the developed equipment on accelerator beams at JINR and CERN. The space detector NUCLEON has been developed for more than 10 years by a collaboration of several scientific and industrial organizations headed by SINP MSU and was designed to study the spectrum and composition of cosmic rays in 10¹¹-5x10¹⁴ eV in the so-called knee (kink in the slope of the spectrum), discovered by Soviet physicists over 50 years ago.

V.M. has extensively participated in development of the fast trigger scintillation system, including its tests, as well as the test of the NUCLEON detector at SPS, CERN. The NUCLEON detector was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on 26 December, 2014 at midnight local time and has been successfully operating in orbit for more than two years. The results obtained have won international recognition and are still cited at all major conferences on cosmic rays.

DLNP JINR employees B.M.Sabirov, L.G.Tkachev and V.M.Grebenyuk assembling the trigger module of the NUCLEON detector

Currently, V.M. is involved in the preparation of space experiments: an application has been submitted by JINR for the IVGShAL experiment at the Russian Orbital Station (ROSS) being currently designed and a project of the OLVE-HERO experiment, a 10-ton ionization-neutron 3D-calorimeter with a high degree of granularity and a uniquely high geometric factor has been submitted together with SINP MSU.

V.M. is the author and co-author of more than 150 scientific papers, including 9 inventions. He was awarded the badge "Inventor of the USSR", twice winner of the JINR Invention Competition, papers with his participation have won prizes at the JINR Scientific Papers Competition four times.

V.M. devotes a lot of time to the training of scientific personnel. For 15 years he has taught at the Dubna branch of MIREA. 12 diploma projects and 2 Ph.D. dissertations have been defended supervised by him. Currently, he is an assistant professor at the Dubna State University.

V.M. is an avid tourist-waterman. The geography of his routes is impressive - countless rapids have been passed on kayaks, catamarans and rafts from the Tolbachik volcano in Kamchatka to the Tisza river in the Carpathians and from the Mezen river in the Arkhangelsk region to the Chatkal river in Central Asia. He also made water trips along the mountain rivers of Altai, the Caucasus and other regions of Russia.

We congratulate Viktor Matveevich on his jubilee, wish him good health, happiness and further success in work.

Colleagues and workmates