The NICA Collider Booster Has Been Started

The proton synchrotron booster has been started at Russia’s Nuclotron-based Ion Collider Facility (NICA), being built in Dubna, near Moscow.

Prime Minister of the Russian Federation Mikhail Mishustin visited the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research and put the first cascade of the NICA complex into operation.

The Booster synchrotron, or the Booster, is a unique superconducting accelerator that has no analogues in the world, which is created in the frames of the NICA mega-science project.

The launch of the Booster of the NICA complex provides scientists with access to the most modern technologies.

Supermodern opportunities of using the beams of this facility will allow high-tech curing of complicated cancer tumours (beam therapy of cancer diseases), solving the issues of medical physiology during long space expeditions.

Such technologies will help process nuclear waste from nuclear power plants, test microelectronics for space satellites, and will be helpful in the fields of ecology and many other realms.

Read the JINR Press Release.

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The NICA collider is an experimental facility, similar to Europe’s CERN in Switzerland, and it is one of Russia’s priority scientific “megaprojects”.

Its purpose is to help understand how protons and neutrons were formed in the universe and help research on extreme densities and temperatures.

Its development began in 2005, and the construction started in 2013. The NICA collider is expected to be fully operational by the end of 2022.

The estimated cost of the project is approximately $500m. The Russian state budget covers about 80% of its cost, while investors from Italy, Germany and the US contribute to the rest.