Joint Institute for Nuclear Research
02.11.2022

"Chronograph. Time's Witnesses: Vadim Aleksandrovich Bednyakov"

An interview by Dmitry Vadimovich Naumov with Vadim Aleksandrovich Bednyakov, Director of the Dzhelepov Laboratory of Nuclear Problems. In 1981, Vadim Aleksandrovich graduated with honours from the MSU Faculty of Physics and was assigned as a trainee researcher to the theoretical Sector of the Department of Particle Physics of the Laboratory of Nuclear Problems. In 1985, he became a junior researcher, in 1985 he defended his candidate dissertation, and in 2001 he headed this Sector.

In 1999, V. A. Bednyakov obtained the degree of Doctor of Physics and Mathematics for research in the fields of particle physics beyond the Standard Model, neutrino physics, and dark matter. His papers on the detection of galactic dark matter particles on Earth and in space became well known worldwide. Vadim Aleksandrovich is an author of above 500 scientific papers and a number of popular science articles. He translated textbooks on non-accelerator physics and astrophysics into Russian.

Since 2004, V. A. Bednyakov is in charge of the participation of JINR staff in physical research at the ATLAS facility which successfully operates at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. At present, he is heading the JINR topic on ATLAS and leading the JINR group of ATLAS collaborators.

Over 15 years, Vadim Aleksandrovich successfully acted as LNP scientific secretary. While being a DLNP deputy director of science over several years, he had been combining his activity with the position of the JINR deputy chief scientific secretary. In 2012, he was appointed scientific secretary of the Scientific Council on Neutrino Physics and Neutrino Astrophysics of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

In 2013, he was elected Director of the Dzhelepov Laboratory of Nuclear Problems, and he is still successfully managing it. During this time, the Deep Underwater Neutrino Telescope in Lake Baikal became a new basic facility of the Institute (Baikal-GVD).

Vadim Aleksandrovich became the laureate of the JINR Prize five times (in 1985, 1999, 2005, 2016 (twice)). He was awarded the Labour Merit Badge “Veteran of Nuclear Power Engineering and Industry” (2007), Honorary Certificate of the State Atomic Energy Corporation Rosatom (2009), Honorary Certificate and Medal of the Moscow Oblast Duma (2013), and Honorary Certificates of JINR (2012), and Head of Administration of Dubna (2013, 2015).

V. A. Bednyakov is a member of the Organizing Committee for a series of international conferences on New Physics in non-accelerator experiments (NANP) and the editor-in-chief of their proceedings. He is also a member of the editorial boards of the journals Nuclear Physics and Physics of Particles and Nuclei, a referee in a number of prestigious international scientific journals, and an expert of the RFBR and RSF.

Current scientific interests of V. A. Bednyakov lie mainly in the fields of particle physics, neutrino physics, and astrophysics. In cooperation with his colleagues, he developed a new approach for describing coherent scattering of neutrinos, antineutrinos, and heavy neutral leptons (dark matter particles) off nuclei. Two large overviews on this topic were published in the journal Physics of Particles and Nuclei.

Filmed by Anastasia Malyshkina