From 1 to 5 March, the annual Fortov International Conference on Interaction of Intense Energy Fluxes with Matter took place at the Terskol village, Kabardino-Balkaria, near mount Elbrus. The speakers covered a wide range of scientific, technical, and methodological topics. The Joint Institute for Nuclear Research was widely represented at the conference: JINR employees prepared two plenary talks and four poster presentations.

A distinctive feature of the 40th Fortov Conference is the large number of presentations at the poster session and the high percentage of young researchers, postgraduates, and engineers (up to 80%). This allows youth specialists to network with colleagues from other scientific and technical organizations and discuss in detail research areas of interest. The scientific programme of this year’s event included 71 plenary and 192 poster presentations.

At the opening of the conference, Special Representative of the Institute’s Director for Cooperation with International and Russian Scientific Organizations, Academician Boris Sharkov delivered a plenary talk. In his presentation “Intense hadron beams for research into matter at extremes”, he outlined the development of heavy ion accelerators in the world and highlighted the role of the NICA Accelerator Complex in solving the problem of extreme states of nuclear matter.

FLAP Collaboration Coordinator (VBLHEP JINR) Anton Baldin gave the final plenary talk on FLAP’s goals and objectives and the broad opportunities the collaboration provides to participants, including research using not only the LINAC-200 Electron Accelerator (DLNP), but also the IREN Facility (FLNP), the microtron (FLNR), and the derived beams of the NICA Complex (VBLHEP).

Anton Baldin noted that it was thanks to the Fortov Conference, which unites a wide range of research teams and organizations, that groups from the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Physics (Sarov) and Lebedev Physical Institute (Moscow) became FLAP participants, and other teams expressed their desire to join the collaboration. Three out of four poster presentations by JINR employees were devoted to the FLAP Collaboration as well.

VBLHEP JINR employees covered a wide range of topics. Andrey Safonov discussed the current detector system of circulating Nuclotron and Booster beams based on microchannel plates, along with the development of new detectors for the NICA Collider’s rings. Dmitry Korovkin presented an analysis of experimental data obtained during Nuclotron’s 55th session, in which specialists simultaneously accelerated and measured three beams with close charge-to-mass ratios. Witold Bleko’s talk was devoted to modelling neutron generation at the LINAC-200 Linear Electron Accelerator. Elina Baldina talked about a self-similar approach to analysing data from nuclear physics experiments aimed at discovering new particle production patterns. Anton Baldin made a poster presentation “Relativistic nuclear physics at the LHEP accelerator complex”, which included methodological issues of relativistic nuclear physics research, basic concepts and principles of writing a scientific description, physical phenomena in relativistic physics, the definitions of variables used to describe relativistic nuclear collisions, and the issues of goal setting and optimisation of experiments planned at the NICA Accelerator Complex.

At the final meeting of the conference, the participants watched a documentary about Academician Vladimir E. Fortov, an outstanding researcher and organizer of scientific activities. The success of the conference is largely determined by the traditions laid down by Academician Fortov and carefully maintained by the event’s permanent organizer, Head of a Department of the Joint Institute for High Temperatures of the Russian Academy of Sciences Konstantin Khishchenko.