The staff members of the Laboratory of Nuclear Problems JINR Alexander Kolesnikov (junior researcher) and Liudmila Kolupaeva (researcher) won the competition for annual awards of the Governor of the Moscow Region in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and innovation for young scientists and specialists in 2022.

Alexander Kolesnikov became the winner of the Governor’s Award for the research and introduction of new materials and technologies for the creation of low-matter gas-discharged position detectors. The creation of such detectors will significantly improve the accuracy of measurements in modern particle physics experiments.

The scientific results obtained by Alexander are already being applied in experiments NA62 (CERN, Switzerland) and MEG II (PSI, Switzerland), and they will also be applied in experiments being prepared at the NICA collider and in the field of radiation monitoring.

Liudmila Kolupaeva submitted a scientific paper for the competition on measuring the parameters of neutrino oscillations in the NOvA experiment (FNAL, USA). The main goal of NOvA research is to more accurately measure the parameters of neutrino oscillations, in particular, the neutrino masses hierarchy and the phase of CP violation. Liudmila participated in several campaigns of the experiment dedicated to oscillatory data analysis, in particular, she carried out the final approximation of the data. The results obtained by her were official for the experiment in 2018 – 2020. Based on them, several collaborative articles were written. In addition, Liudmila together with colleagues from the collaboration worked on the development of various parts of oscillatory analysis: the choice of data selection criteria, a way to account for systematic errors, the development of extrapolation procedures between detectors and data interpretation.

These scientific papers are of fundamental nature. But in the future, this information will also be important in the practical application of neutrino fluxes. The areas under discussion are monitoring the operation of nuclear reactors, the Earth tomography, the space exploration using ultra-high-energy neutrinos. The developed methods and software tools can be used in other experiments of the subject. The work is underway to adapt them for the DUNE experiment, in which JINR also participates.

The competition were announced by the Government of the Moscow Region on 12 October.

We congratulate the Institute’s staff members on winning the competition and wish them high scientific achievements, new discoveries, and brilliant results!

The competition for awards of the Governor of the Moscow region in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and innovation for young scientists and specialists has been held for the eleventh year. During this time, 160 laureates received the award. Annually 15 Governor’s awards in the fields of science and innovations are awarded in the amount of 700,000 rubles each. The Award is a money reward and a winner certificate.

We would like to remind you that in previous years, the winners of the Moscow Region Governor’s Award were a LRB researcher Yuliya Vinogradova in 2016, Deputy Head of the Science Organization and International Cooperation Office Oleg Belov in 2017, a DLNP researcher Nikolai Azaryan in 2018, and the DLNP team of authors in 2020: a leading engineer Ivan Gorodnov and a researcher Anton Dolzhikov.