Interview conducted in April 2022

Shvetsov Valery - PhD. in physics and mathematics, Director at the Frank Laboratory of Neutron Physics, Joint Institute for Nuclear Research. (since February 2023 Head of the Department of Nuclear Physics)

In the anniversary year for the Joint Institute and on the eve of their own anniversaries, the staff members of the Frank Laboratory of Neutron Physics look back how their careers began and speak about what new generations of researchers can be engaged in at FLNP at present. Today Valery Nikolaevich SHVETSOV tells about his path from trainee to Laboratory Director.
“The Institute turned 65, next year the Laboratory will turn 65. Although, FLNP was officially developed in 1956 and there is a note about it in the decisions of the first meeting of the Committee of Plenipotentiaries, we do not know the exact date of development of FLNP, we start from the first order on personnel, when in May 1957 I. M. Frank was appointed Director of the Laboratory. Last year marked 60 years since the launch of our first IBR reactor, which had faithfully served for ten years, after which it was replaced by a more powerful IBR-30 with LUE-40. Simultaneously, with the operation of IBR-30, the department of IBR-2 was first developed in 1966 and design work of the new reactor with a power three orders of magnitude higher than the megawatt range started. This, as well as the development of the first reactor, was also the initiative of Dmitry Ivanovich Blokhintsev, supported by the Directorate of the Laboratory - Ilya Mikhailovich Frank and Fedor Lvovich Shapiro. The latter was as a powerful engine of all scientific ideas at FLNP. And a lot had been done during that time. If according to the formal signs of Soviet science, i.e. registered discoveries, there are not so many achievements at FLNP, there are only two of them, at the Dzhelepov Laboratory of Nuclear Problems, for example, two dozen discoveries have been carried out. Nevertheless, we were at the forefront of science, the first IBR reactor became an absolutely remarkable machine for that time. The upgraded version of the first reactor, the IBR-30 + LUE-40 booster, successfully operated from 1969 to 2000. It had a total neutron emission of 1014 neutrons per second, a very short pulse duration of 4,5 microseconds, the entire infrastructure developed in the late 50s and early 60s, with a flight base of up to a kilometer. All this made it a completely unique neutron spectrometer, which allowed our physicists to crank out a lot of scientific products. If nuclear databases are now opened, then at every step there will be experiments carried out at IBR-30. The IREN facility, which is underway development, has already started operating for the experiment in 2010, but so far it cannot be compared in terms of scientific output with old machines.”

How did you come to work at FLNP?
To tell the truth, when I studied at the university, I did not think about neutron physics. Like most of my casual friends, by the end of the third year, when the division into departments was underway, I had not yet decided on the choice of the area. I can say that Dubna itself brought me to Dubna. All departments of the Faculty of Physics of Moscow State University arranged special meetings with students. The Department of Elementary Particle Physics, which I later graduated from, held such a meeting in Dubna, at the branch of SINP MSU, we were invited to visit the Institute. At the end of May, in the evening, I was walking from the station along Kurchatov street with my friends whom I persuaded to come to Dubna. Silence. Lilac blossomed. I am from a small town Mineralnye Vody in the south of the Stavropol Territory and I was tired of noisy Moscow.
I chose this department and I defended my diploma at DLNP, so I get to know the people from this Laboratory and I am familiar with the topic. It so happened that I could no longer work at DLNP and thanks to the acquaintance of my supervisor David Mikhailovich Khazins with Aleksandr Vladimirovich Strelkov and Vladislav Ivanovich Lushchikov, I also got to know them. V. I. Lushchikov talked to me, got satisfied and introduced me to Ilya Mikhailovich Frank, who decided that I would be employed at the Laboratory to study ultracold neutrons. And I, together with Viktor Pavlovich Alfimenkov, Aleksandr Vladimirovich Strelkov and other colleagues, took part in the development of the KOVSH facility for measuring the neutron lifetime. Later, experiments were carried out in Gatchina, there was a cooperation with PNPI, then this facility moved to Grenoble. In parallel, I worked with Lev Borisovich Pikelner in a group that studied the resonance neutron - nucleus interactions and the effects of parity nonconservation in resonances. I acted as Head of the department and later became Head of the department of nuclear physics and when A. V. Belushkin was Head of the Laboratory, in 2001 he offered me to become Deputy Director. Since then, to be honest, I have been pursuing less science, but I try to do something. Most of all I am engaged in neutron and gamma-ray detectors for spacecraft.

Have you transferred anything from your company with Ilya Mikhailovich to your directorial practice?
I didn’t spend much time with Ilya Mikhailovich – what a talking may be between a director and a trainee? But when I was being employed, he met me, Ilya Mikhailovich personally met everyone who was employed. Today, I don't do it, although I always think that this tradition should be renewed. I try to keep the spirit. According to all the stories, memoirs, Ilya Mikhailovich and Fedor Lvovich were very open to deal with and absolutely not high-altitude people ...

...You also always have the door to your office wide open.
Not always. When I was Head of the department, it was not always open, now it is. Fedor Lvovich constantly worked closely with the staff members, he was a scientific supervisor, he gave ideas. Today, times are a little different, and if the head of the scientific department is also a scientific leader, this is wonderful, but it not always happens so. I cannot consider myself a scientific leader for the whole Laboratory in all areas. I understand something in nuclear physics and I express my point of view in discussions at STC, but in condensed matter physics I cannot dictate something by order, I always consult with members of the directorate, with heads of departments, with specific people. Only through discussion and cooperation the best ways can be determined.

How can the Laboratory attract the youth today and tomorrow?
I can say. The physics we are engaged in differs from other areas at the Institute, I am not talking about other centers, as far as there is such kind of physics in other centers where, crudely put, people do not construct large hadron colliders, they prepare some kind of experiment on them during 20 years, and then an article about this work is published, where there is a list of co-authors for 50 pages and two pages for the work itself. This is a very worthy, advanced physics, but the role of an individual person is negligible there. In our physics, in the physics of neutrinos at DLNP, the role of each individual person is important and it is decisive. This physics was called sealing wax-and-string by Rutherford, when experimental facilities were manufactured from improvised materials. Yuri Sergeevich Zamyatnin, who participated in the work on the Atomic Project, called it Egyptian rope physics. They, assembling a subcritical assembly, carefully lowered the hemisphere on a rope passed through the block. There were special coasters in case the rope got loose or broke, to prevent an uncontrolled chain reaction from starting. And we are engaged in approximately the same physics, of course, with mechanisation and automation. Anyway, these are things that can be understood and embraced by one person who will know everything about his experiment: science, detectors, processing programs. And this is the interest. Anyone who likes to do something himself should come to us.
At the same time, at our Laboratory, the neutron as a particle allows us to obtain results that, oddly enough, are close to the Standard Model or the same Higgs boson and so on, because nature is one, principles and laws are the same everywhere. Such intersections occur quite often when ultracold neutrons allow to measure the characteristics of the neutron, on which the scenario of the development of the Universe in the first minutes after the Big Bang directly depends - this is the neutron lifetime, angular correlations in neutron beta decay. All neutron cross sections directly determine the parameters of the so-called primordial nucleosynthesis that took place after the Big Bang. Today, all the processes in stars that take place in the observable and unobservable Universe, mainly take place through neutrons. All cross sections for the neutron-nucleus interaction, especially with rare isotopes not available on Earth, determine the dynamics and development of stars. If we have no such cross sections, then we cannot build an accurate model of star formation. Neutron physics has a true output to cosmic scales. When I said that particle and high energy physics is the most advanced physics, it is true, but we are not going far, the next car behind the locomotive.

In what areas does the research at the Laboratory develop?
At present, we have a lot of new areas, life itself determines them. The condensed matter physics originated at FLNP exclusively due to the initiative of Polish colleagues headed by Jerzy Janik, supported by F. L. Shapiro and staff members. A lot has been carried out for the first time: diffractometry with pulsed sources, Fourier diffractometry, research at high pressures - in this area we are one of the leading laboratories in the world today. This is a story that has existed since the last century. And completely new things are biology, which however also began in the 1990s after the launch of IBR-2 and nowadays it is small-angle scattering with nanoparticles as applied to biology and pharmacology, applied things related to power sources - lithium-ion batteries, this was started by A. M. Balagurov and today M. V. Avdeev is the leader of a large project.
The activation analysis has always occurred in nuclear physics - V. M. Nazarov began to study it and in the time of M. V. Frontasyeva it flourished, extensive partnerships with JINR Member States and other states developed. Today, I. Zinkovskaya keeps these traditions and new areas related to biotechnologies using nanoparticles, as well as the medical direction develop. An activation area was evolved that operates at IREN today. They took up archeology and history. And again thanks to human relations. We went to T. D. Panova, the former director of the Moscow Kremlin Museums. From the depositories, she gave us pieces of the bones of noble people of medieval Moscow - the son of Ivan the Terrible, his first wife, Prince Mikhail Skopin-Shuisky. And A. Yu. Dmitriev with his colleagues analysed them for the occurrence of mercury and arsenic. They also did a great job, here I can boast, that was my initiative, with ceramics. I once wondered whether in Uzbekistan neutron activation analysis was used to study ceramics and I received the answer - it is very difficult. Ceramics is such an object that always carries impurities of the environment where it has been located: water, earth, soot from a fire, and so on. In terms of composition, it consists of simple materials; it is not meteorites to explore - a thankless task. Andrey Yuryevich, with his perseverance and pedantry, in collaboration with archaeologists, began this work, there are already the first results, and there is a feeling that the process is on the right track and it is thanks to cooperation with archaeologists who help us. The same group carries out analysis on frescoes in order to try to develop a technology for their restoration after a fire and there are quite a lot of such objects. The goal of the analysis is to establish the colors that were before the fire, in order to return them during restoration. Here, on my table Andrey Yuryevich brings pieces of frescoes that Theophanes the Greek painted - an ancient artifact among our samples. Well, and those things that I do myself, are instruments for spacecraft. Your prints remain on them, although they are then carefully erased at NASA and Roscosmos, but you know that they were there, and then this device flies 200 million kilometers and operates perfectly and you turn on the computer and monitor its operation from the office.

It is impossible not to talk about the project of a new neutron source ...
All the successes of FLNP refer the neutron sources that we have, thanks to the founding fathers - Blokhintsev, Frank and Shapiro. Without one of them, there would be no today's "neutron". Thanks to courage and perseverance of Dmitry Ivanovich the first pulsed reactor was developed. It is today we have computers, simulation, but in those years there was none of these technologies. People calculated something on slide rulers, measured some cross sections in parallel, of course, enormous experience was accumulated in the Atomic Project. I'm sure he's made the most of it here. In four years they developed such a reactor, which Blokhintsev compared to a sleeping dragon, which you pull by the tip of its tail 10 times per second. The machine turned out to be unique and wonderful, like all subsequent ones and this achievement determined the scientific success of our Laboratory. If we want to still exist as a scientific team with high results, we vitally need to have our own new neutron source. After modernization, the IBR-2 reactor is a wonderful machine, but it has a limited service life, until about 2035. We optimistically hope that we will be able to extend its life. And the construction of advanced facilities is a long process, so the design of a new source is underway. I must express my deep gratitude to the Directorate of the Institute, that recognises the significance and necessity of this area and supports us. So far, there is a consensus at the Laboratories of the Institute that the new neutron source is a major JINR project that will be implemented by the 2030s.
This is a very complex and expensive project. We have always said that IBR-2 is much cheaper than modern accelerator sources. During the drafting of the new source, PAC members began to ask us about its approximate cost. We made an expert estimation of the 1975 GSPI project documentation for IBR-2. The adjusted cost of the project is 26 million rubles. Taking into account the dollar exchange rate and its inflation during this time, according to the Central Bank, the estimated cost of constructing IBR-2 today amounts to approximately $180 million. This is significantly cheaper than ESS, which is estimated at $2 billion. We claim to be the most advanced source, we want to have an average flux density, like for ESS and the pulse duration is an order of magnitude smaller, respectively, our pulse density will be an order of magnitude greater. We demand from NIKIET to design such a machine for us, this is at the limit of their capabilities. Without it, we have no future, we must do it, this is the task of the future Directorate of the Laboratory, even two generations of directors.
Ideally, it would be great if IBR-2 operated until the launch of a new source. Our experience and the experience of others, especially of Russian scientific centers, shows that if there is no basic set of principles, the scientific team quickly disintegrates. We had such experience when IBR-30 was still operating, there were both condensed matter physics and nuclear physics, and IBR-2 and facilities on it were being constructed in parallel. Physicists were able to smoothly move from one source to another. Such a solution would be ideal for us, but how it will turn out - life will show.

Olga TARANTINA