Nikitin, Vladimir Alekseevich (physicist)

Vladimir Alekseevich Nikitin was born on June 13, 1934 in Serpukhov , Moscow Region. In 1941, he and his family were evacuated to the Gorky region, where he went to school.

In 1958, Nikitin graduated from the Physics Department of Moscow State University. It was distributed to the High Energy Laboratory (LHE) of JINR , which was headed by Vladimir Iosifovich Veksler . The field of Nikitin's scientific interests has become experimental high-energy physics. The most important results were obtained by him in the study of diffraction processes.

In experiments on the elastic interaction of protons in the energy range of 1.4 GeV, the real part of the scattering amplitude was discovered, a narrowing of the diffraction cone with increasing energy of the primary particle was found, which indicates an increase in the radius of the interaction region of hadrons. Nikitin developed a fundamentally new method for studying the elastic scattering of protons on protons at small angles. Its essence consists in the implementation of such an acceleration regime in which the beam repeatedly crosses a thin internal target. The reaction products in the target are recorded by semiconductor detectors. Two types of targets were developed: a thin film and a supersonic gas jet. An unprecedentedly accurate and efficient technique made it possible in the 1970s to study diffraction processes at the Serpukhov U-70 accelerator and at the accelerator in Batavia (USA ^[1] . As a result, new phenomena were discovered: interference of Coulomb and nuclear scattering, narrowing of the diffraction cone in pp- , pd- and pHe-scattering with increasing energy, the important role of three- pomeron interaction in inelastic diffraction was proved. These discoveries played a fundamental role in shaping our understanding of the asymptotics of hadron interactions.

Nikitin was involved in the development of a supersonic jet hydrogen target, which has found wide application in research on cyclic accelerators . A number of his works are devoted to the study of the interaction of relativistic nuclei. Fragmentation of nuclei was studied and the search for phase transitions of excited nuclear matter was performed.

In the 1990s, Nikitin and his colleagues performed a series of studies of nucleus-nucleus interactions at the JINR Synchrophasotron and the TRIUMF cyclotron (Canada). The next step in this direction was made at the WA-98 facility at CERN and at the STAR facility at BNL . These studies have allowed significant progress in understanding the evolutionary laws of excited nuclear matter. In 2003-2008, Nikitin led the topic "The birth of particles in pp-interaction with high multiplicity." The project was implemented on the U-70 accelerator at IHEP. The study of the collective behavior of particles in a system with a high energy density was performed. A new phenomenon has been discovered - pion condensation. Vladimir Alekseevich continues to develop this direction by participating in the physical substantiation of the creation of a multipurpose detector ( MPD ) at the NICA accelerator complex under construction. With his participation, an electromagnetic calorimeter was created that was tested on the extracted beam of the Nuclotron .