Russia plans to launch 20 experimental stations at PIK reactor, NICA collider by end-2026 - deputy PM

YEKATERINBURG. Sept 14 (Interfax) - Russia has plans to launch 20 experimental stations at the PIK reactor near St. Petersburg and the NICA collider outside Moscow by the end of the year, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Chernyshenko said.

"We will launch 20 experimental stations at the PIK reactor near St. Petersburg and the NICA collider near Moscow by the end of the year," Chernyshenko said while speaking at the International Youth Festival in Yekaterinburg on Monday.

The PIK research nuclear reactor, whose name is an acronym derived from the surnames of its original developers, physicists Yury Petrov and Kir Konoplev, is located at the Konstantinov Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute in the town of Gatchina. It is designed for the study of neutrons, neutron radiation, and objects at the microscopic scale.

The Nuclotron-based Ion Collider fAcility (NICA) collider is a superconducting accelerator complex for heavy ions and protons, which was developed at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna outside Moscow.