On 17–18 March, the Baikal-GVD Neutrino Telescope 2025 workshop took place at the Baikal-GVD Coastal Centre. The event was chaired by Minister of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation Valery Falkov and devoted to summarising the results of the three-year neutrino and particle astrophysics research programme that finished in 2024. The programme was implemented at the Baikal neutrino telescope by six scientific organizations and universities subordinate to the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of Russia as part of government assignments.

Photo: © Evgeny Bondarev

The meeting brought together more than 30 participants representing the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, the Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences (INR RAS), RAS Lebedev Physical Institute (LPI), Moscow Engineering Physics Institute (MEPhI), and the state universities of Moscow (MSU), Novosibirsk (NSU), Tomsk, Kabardino-Balkaria (KBSU), and Irkutsk (ISU).

Valery Falkov opened the meeting, noting the uniqueness of the Baikal neutrino telescope. Its location and Baikal water’s properties allow achieving record accuracy in determining the arrival direction of neutrino particles. This is four times the accuracy achieved in the IceCube Experiment in Antarctica. Head of the Ministry of Education and Science emphasised that JINR’s initiative to implement the neutrino programme of Russian scientific and educational organizations was introduced very timely, and the programme’s success lies not only in the creation of joint laboratories and research groups or the equipment’s modernisation, but also in the annual increase in the number of recorded neutrino events. In 2024, the Baikal telescope detected Milky Way astrophysical neutrinos with an energy exceeding 200 TeV. This will require revising the theory of the origin and distribution of these particles in the Galaxy.

JINR Director, Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences Grigory Trubnikov noted that today, the Baikal-GVD Project is represented by a large international collaboration. The expedition involves 60 people, including a group of scientists from the the People’s Republic of China, who are completing the setup of their own experimental cluster of the telescope.

“The 45th expedition to deploy the Baikal-GVD is nearing completion. Once it finishes, we expect the total volume of the neutrino telescope to be about 0.7 km³. Due to the difficulties caused by the weather, this year’s expedition is twice as short as usual,” the JINR Director said.

Grigory Trubnikov noted that in March 2021, the Russian Ministry of Education and Science and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research signed a memorandum of understanding on the development of the Baikal Neutrino Telescope, and a neutrino physics programme was launched in 2022. As part of this programme, the Russian Ministry of Science and Higher Education has supported six organizations over three years. Since the end of 2022, as part of a state assignment, National Research Nuclear University MEPhI tackled the tasks of the programme with the participation of JINR, INR RAS, and the Kurchatov Institute under the supervision of MEPhI Rector Vladimir Shevchenko. In total, 110 people, including almost 90 young scientists, are involved in the work on the telescope. Over the course of the programme, six scientific laboratories were created, and more than a hundred research papers were published.

“We actively cooperate with representatives of Irkutsk scientific organizations: limnologists, seismologists, and geophysicists. In the near future, several new instruments for low background measurements and muon tomography development will be installed at the bottom of Lake Baikal in the telescope area. This is a promising field, especially for nuclear power plants,” Grigory Trubnikov continued.

MEPhI Rector Vladimir Shevchenko summarised the results of the state assignments on neutrinos and astrophysics. The contribution of each organization to the implementation of the programme was briefly reviewed. ISU Rector Alexander Schmidt spoke about the institute’s participation in major scientific projects.

Deputy Director of the Laboratory of Nuclear Problems at JINR, JINR Neutrino Programme Head Dmitry Naumov made a presentation “Prospects for the creation of a new programme of government assignments for neutrino physics and astrophysics research”. He noted that as part of the programme, groups of young scientists worked on the projects of Baikal-GVD, TAIGA, INR RAS Baksan Neutrino Observatory, along with neutrino projects at nuclear power plants. This includes developing new generation neutrinos detectors and searching for phenomena beyond the Standard Model. The programme participants are ready to propose ideas of research for the next three years. “The great scientific potential that was accumulated must be used for new achievements,” Dmitry Naumov said. If the programme continues, about 50 representatives of three universities (Information Technologies, Mechanics, and Optics University; the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology; the Higher School of Economics) are ready to participate in it.

Another point of discussion was the promising Russian federal programme for the study of the fundamental properties of matter, the preparation of which was one of the tasks of the neutrino programme. The programme’s general concept has been developed over the past three years in cooperation with the Kurchatov Institute and the RAS Physics Division. It will be assessed from scientific point of view at various RAS divisions and at a meeting of the Academy’s Presidium. The final version of the programme is planned to be submitted to the Russian Ministry of Science and Higher Education at the end of this year.

In addition, the workshop discussed a potential scientific tourist route including the facilities of the Baikal neutrino telescope and the National Heliogeophysical Complex, which is being constructed in Irkutsk Region and the Republic of Buryatia. Valery Falkov stressed that the creation of the route is aimed at solving two of the three key tasks of the Decade of Science and Technology announced by Russian President Vladimir Putin: attracting talented young people to research and increasing the accessibility of information about the achievements and prospects of Russian science for citizens.

On 17 March, the meeting participants visited the expedition’s ice camp, where the 14th telescope cluster was submerged in water. On 18 March, the meeting continued with talks about the prospects of the Baikal-GVD Experiment, its progress and expansion, current physics tasks, event modelling, and ways to attract new participants to the collaboration. Representatives of INR RAS, LPI, the MSU Skobeltsyn Institute of Nuclear Physics, MEPhI, KBSU, NSU, and ISU discussed how their respective institutions fulfil state assignments in neutrino physics and astrophysics research.