At PAC meetings

Denes Nagy: postscript to the meeting

We wrote about the work of the 57th meeting of the Programme Advisory Committee for Condensed Matter Physics in No.23 of our weekly. PAC Chairman Prof. Denes Nagy, as well as some of the Committee's experts, participated in the meeting online.

Today, we publish his interview on the results of the Committee's work.

FLNP proposed six infrastructure and research projects: the development of IBR-2, further work on the new reactor project, various research projects. How were they estimated by the Committee experts?

- In general, the estimation was carried out in the traditional way, that is, based on expert feedback. However, as far as the FLNP proposals are concerned, this time the situation was somewhat more complicated. Indeed, the agenda of the meeting had to be slightly changed a few days before the meeting, at the request of the FLNP Directorate, to reformulate the configuration of topics and projects. The new concept assumed the occurrence of one large infrastructure project called "Pulsed neutron source and spectrometers" and several subprojects instead of the previous topics. This concept was presented at the meeting by FLNP Director Egor Lychagin, after which a detailed discussion took place. Of course, the infrastructure project itself was not estimated by the experts, in contrast to the subprojects that received a proper evaluation based on reviews prepared by the experts. The PAC supported the opening of this infrastructure project along with sub-projects.

An unusually large number of projects were presented at this meeting by other laboratories: five projects were from DLNP, two each from LRB and FLNR. Were there any discussions on new projects?

- I would like to add one more item to your list, namely the new project "Nanobiophotonics" presented by Grigory Arzumanyan. Frankly, this project comes from FLNP but it uses photons, not neutrons. Of course, all these projects were discussed in detail and estimated on the basis of expert conclusions. In some cases, very sensitive issues were touched upon, such as whether and how the recent, regrettable withdrawal of some Member States from JINR might affect the feasibility of the project. All new projects have predecessors and are in full accordance with JINR's long-term Seven-Year Plan, so that the PAC does not feel compelled to pay special attention to one area at the expense of others.

The poster session was held in the already traditional online format. What was the level of the presented papers this time?

- I really appreciate that you are already calling a completely new online format "traditional". In fact, I think that we should remain in this format even when - I hope soon, we will return to face-to-face meetings. All electronic posters were beautiful works worthy of respect. Nevertheless, it was immediately clear which 5-6 works out of 12 have a chance to get into the top three as a result of a secret ballot of PAC members.

For the first time, written proposals for new projects were considered at this meeting. Will this format become commonplace for the programme committee?

- No, I hope not. This time we had to go this way, because we had an extremely large number of projects to be reviewed. Of course, the experts also considered projects related to this group. However, skipping a meaningful discussion just because of lack of time is certainly not the best procedure.

What are your impressions of the meeting with JINR Directorate?

- As always, this was the climax of the meeting of the Programme Committee. I was impressed by the involvement and openness of all representatives of JINR Directorate and I thank them for the most informative contribution to this hour-long meeting. I would especially like to emphasize the role of Director of the Joint Institute Grigory Trubnikov and the Scientific Leader of JINR Victor Matveev that did not hesitate to enter into very specific and sensitive discussions and answer rather direct questions put by some members of the PAC. I really appreciate their behavior, because I am convinced that it shows the only way out of the crisis of these days in the spirit of the JINR motto "Science brings nations together".

Olga TARANTINA,
photo by Igor LAPENKO