Physicists of the Irkutsk State University will receive 10 million rubles a year to research high-energy cosmic rays. It has become possible due to the grant from the Russian Science Foundation (RSF).

Professor Nikolai Budnev, Director of the ISU Research Institute of Applied Physics reveals more about the project “Precision Measuring of High-Energy Cosmic Rays Mass Composition is the Key to Define Types of Cosmic Accelerators”:

- This grant is for a special task we laid out when studying cosmic rays in the Tunkinsky Center for Astrophysics. High-energy particles arrive at Earth from outer space. In general, these are nuclei of different chemical elements. To determine sources of these particles we need to know distribution of nuclei – how much hydrogen, helium, oxygen, heavy elements and others they contain.

The research will allow us to understand what physical mechanisms operate in these sources, how cosmic accelerators are built to accelerate particles to energies of millions or even billions of times greater than the Earth’s most powerful accelerator, the hadron collider, can.

Doctor Leonid Kuz'michev, head of a department at the Institute of Nuclear Physics, Moscow State University, led the project.

The grant is given for three years, and upon successful implementation it may be extended for another two years. But even five years is a short period of our work on the construction of Gamma Ray Observatory TAIGA and research we conduct in the Tunka Valley.