"I am proud to receive the prestigious Bruno Pontecorvo Scholarship..."
– Ivan, please tell us a bit about yourself: how long have you been working at DLNP JINR, in which department/sector, and what is the scope of your scientific/work interests?
My scientific activity at JINR began in my third year of studies at Dubna University and took place in Group 1 (Organic Scintillation Detectors) of Sector 5 (Semiconductor and Scintillation Detectors) of the Department of Nuclear Spectroscopy and Radiochemistry at DLNP under the supervision of the Group Head, I. B. Nemchenok. After completing my Master's degree in 2019, I continued working in the department as an engineer, and later as a junior researcher. The scope of my scientific interests includes instruments, methods, and materials for detecting ionizing radiation, particle physics, and rare processes.
– Which of your scientific and work achievements seem most important and significant to you personally?
The development of methods for producing new tellurium-loaded organic scintillators, which could form the basis for detectors in future experiments searching for rare processes (such as neutrinoless double beta decay, candidate particles for dark matter, and other phenomena and particles beyond the Standard Model), for example, for the JUNO experiment after the completion of its main physics program.
– Who nominated you for the scholarship? Which of your works were listed in the scholarship application?
I was nominated for the scholarship by the head of the department, S. V. Rozov. The application listed the entire cycle of work on developing methods for producing new tellurium-loaded liquid and plastic scintillators for experiments searching for rare processes.
The most significant works:
1. Suslov I.A., Nemchenok I.B., Shitov Yu.A. et al. Development of a new tellurium-loaded liquid scintillator based on linear alkylbenzene // Nuclear Instrument and Methods Physics Research A. 2022. P. 167131. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nima.2022.167131
2. I. Suslov, I. Nemchenok, A. Klimenko et al. Tellurium-loaded organic scintillators // Journal of Instrumentation. 2023. V. 18. P. 08026. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-0221/18/08/P08026
3. I. Suslov, I. Nemchenok, A. Bystryakov, A novel approach to load tellurium in liquid scintillator // Journal of Instrumentation. 2025. V. 20. P. 04032. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-0221/20/04/P04032
– What are your scientific and work plans for the scholarship year?
This year, I plan to defend my candidate dissertation in physics and mathematics and continue collaborative work with the Nuclear Physics Division of the Frank Laboratory of Neutron Physics on producing and studying plastic scintillators for particle identification by pulse shape discrimination.
– Bruno Maksimovich Pontecorvo is one of the most prominent scientists who worked at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research. What do his life story, his contribution to world science, and to the history of DLNP JINR mean to you?
I am proud to receive the prestigious Bruno Pontecorvo Scholarship. I consider him one of the great students of Enrico Fermi and an internationally recognized scholar who, despite the vicissitudes of fate, possessed an incredible ability to look into the future through his scientific ideas: neutron logging, the chlorine-argon method for neutrino detection, neutrino oscillations, etc.
