by Alexei SISSAKIAN, Director of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Dubna The Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) was set up in line with the Agreement signed in Moscow on March 26, 1956, by government representatives of eleven constituent countries (Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary, GDR, China, North Korea, Mongolia, Poland, Romania, USSR, Czechoslovakia) with the aim of pooling their scientific and material potential in studying the basic characteristics of matter. In September 1956 the Democratic Republic of Vietnam joined up, to be followed by the Republic of Cuba in 1976. Nuclear physicists from all the participant countries flocked to Dubna, the hometown of JINR. Dubna became an international town. However, the nuclear research center established at the confluence of two rivers, the Dubna and the Volga northwest of Moscow, had a previous record of history. In the late 1940s the then obscure community became the place where the world's largest particle accelerator, the synchrophasotron, was commissioned for basic research into the physics of high-energy elementary particles and atomic nuclei. Its construction was launched on the initiative of a group of Soviet physicists with Acad. Igor Kurchatov at the head, for which purpose the first laboratory was set up there in 1947. Up until 1953 for security reasons it was attached to the Institute for Nuclear Energy and was known as the Hydrotechnical Laboratory of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR; subsequently it was accorded a status of an independent research center, the Institute for Nuclear Problems of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Meanwhile the town of Dubna kept expanding. In 1951 another research body was founded there, the Electro-physical Laboratory of the USSR Academy of Sciences where a research team headed by Vladimir Wexler (elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1958) began work on building a new synchrophasotron, a high-energy <10 GeV accelerator, with record beam energy paramete ... Читать далее