50 years Institute for Nuclear Research: exploring the high-energy universe

Abstract

This article is an attempt to review 50 years of high-energy cosmic particle physics at the Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences. It is written by an outsider whose scientific career, to a large part, was shaped by collaborating with INR scientists in the late 1980s and 1990s. The review covers the fields of cosmic-ray, gamma-ray, and high-energy neutrino physics. The main focus will be on INR's large facilities in the Baksan Valley and at Lake Baikal. Research at these facilities is accompanied by participation in top experiments at different places around the world: recently, the Telescope Array in the USA and the LHAASO detector in China.

Origin of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos: new results and prospects

“…Equipment tests at the first of these two sites were performed in 2022-23, and at Baikal they are scheduled for 2024. The neutrino telescope at Lake Baikal became, more than 25 years ago, the first to detect [79,80] a neutrino event with the method subsequently used to obtain all the results discussed in this paper (see also the historical review [81]). Maybe in another 25 years, the facility will become the world's most ambitious neutrino detector with the working volume 30 times larger than that of the present-day IceCube.…”