On 26 February, the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research pays tribute to the memory of the outstanding scientist Alexander Mikhailovich Baldin
(1926 – 2001), the founder of the scientific field relativistic nuclear physics, who for almost thirty years headed the JINR Laboratory of High Energy Physics. In addition to that, the author of a number of discoveries, laureate of the USSR State and Lenin Prizes, Academician Baldin made contributions to such areas of microworld physics as physics of electromagnetic interactions of hadrons and nuclei, the quark structure of matter, physics and technology of particle accelerators and nuclei.

Alexander Baldin took part in the engineering of the legendary Synchrophasotron, being one of the principal authors of the technical design of this facility. Under his leadership and according to his idea, a superconducting accelerator of relativistic nuclei, the Nuclotron, was built in the Synchrophasotron building, which is now becoming part of the NICA Accelerator Complex. The Nuclotron was built using innovative at that time Dubna-type superconducting magnet technology, which was proposed and developed at JINR and is now in demand in nuclear centres around the world.