China-Russia Sci-tech Years kicks off. [IMAGE: XINHUA]

On August 26 China and Russia kicked off their Year of Scientific and Technological Innovation, which involves 1000 plus scheduled scientific activities. President Xi Jinping and Russian President Putin sent their congratulations to the Year’s opening.

A bilateral scientific collaborative agreement to deepen their joint work on a NICA mega science facility was signed by Huang Wei, Vice Minister of the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology and G. V. Trubnikov, First Vice-Director of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) at the online opening ceremony. The signing ceremony was held in the presence of Chinese Vice Premier Sun Chunlan and Russian Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova.

Former Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev visits ASIPP.[IMAGE: HFIPS]

As a facilitator, Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (HFIPS) has made enormous efforts to reach bilateral collaboration on the NICA project which involves participation by seven Chinese sci-tech institutes. And HFIPS is one of the Chinese parties chosen to construct MJ-level high temperature superconductor energy storage magnet systems (HTS SMES) as part of the NICA mega science facility.

It is one of the key goals of the giant project with the aim to compensate for load fluctuations as well as to suppress frequency fluctuations, and then to ensure the safety of the NICA accelerator in case of accident, thereby improving stability of the system.

A flagship project of JINR, NICA is a mega science facility to produce heavy-ion colliding beams with a complex of superconducting rings.

JINR has been a long-time friend of HFIPS, especially in superconducting technology. Back in 2012, HFIPS and JINR started their partnership by collaborating on superconducting current leads.

For nearly eight years, collaboration between the two sci-tech institutions has blossomed. They jointly built the China-Russia Superconducting Proton Research Center in 2015 under an overall NICA-EAST collaborative framework, and their collaboration has never stopped. They took the institutional-level collaboration up to a higher level by building China’s Belt and Road Superconducting Proton Research Center.

Besides the deep collaboration in superconducting technology, HFIPS has built and been expanding its joint work with Russia scientific institutions and universities in other research areas.

China-Russia joint research center on superconducting protons and atmospheric optics is founded in Hefei. [IMAGE: HFIPS]

The China-Russia Research Center for Atmospheric Optics was built last year to push further its collaboration on Lidar atmospheric detection with the Institute of Atmospheric Optics (IAO) under the Russian Academy of Sciences. Several collaborative agreements, focusing on high-power supply, accelerators, medical equipment and special crystals, were achieved last year. The High Intensity D-T Fusion Neutron Generator (HINEG) opened up a new chapter of collaboration with Russian partners in neutron research.

Russia has always been a great sci-tech partner of China. HFIPS has been sticking to its Russia-collaboration strategy to expand and extend its joint efforts with Russian partners. Both sides are looking forward to more sci-tech collaboration in the near future.

Source: Chinese Academy of Sciences