Russia has invited South Africa to join Project Nica, which is a major scientific programme to build a superconducting particle collider. The name Nica is derived from the full title of the project: Nuclotron-based Ion Collider fAcility. Construction started in 2013 and the commissioning of the complex is scheduled for 2020. The aim of the Nica project is to allow scientists to recreate Quark-Gluon Plasma, a special state of matter that existed in the universe shortly after the Big Bang.

The Nica facility will be hosted by the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research (JINR) in the city of Dubna, in the Moscow region. This is an international organisation, with 18 member states at the moment: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Cuba, the Czech Republic, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Mongolia, North Korea, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Vietnam. A number of other countries participate in JINR activities, or cooperate with it, under bilateral intergovernmental agreements.

One of the countries with a bilateral relationship with the JINR is South Africa. The others are Egypt, Germany, Hungary, Italy and Serbia, all six being classified by the JINR as associate members. The relationship between South Africa and the JINR dates back to 2005, when the South African and Russian governments signed a memorandum of understanding allowing South African and JINR researchers to develop collaborative research and for South African postgradute students to receive training and undertake research at the JINR. Since then, South African postgraduate students have received training and gained experience at the JINR every year, for three weeks in September and/or October.

When operational, Nica will be able to generate a range of particle beams including protons, polarised deuterons (the nucleus of the deuterium, or heavy hydrogen, atom, comprising one proton and one neutron), as well as extremely massive gold ions (gold atoms that have lost or gained electrons, making them positively or negatively charged). The collider will be able to accelerate heavy ions up to a kinetic energy of 4.5 Giga electron Volts (GeV) – or 4.5 billion electron volts – per nucleon (a nucleon is a proton or a neutron). It will be able to accelerate protons up to 12.6 GeV.

The collider will have two main instruments – the Multi Purpose Detector (MPD) and the Spin Physics Detector (SPD). The MPD will function as a spectrometer specialising in the observation of highly luminous heavy ion collisions and detecting the charged hadrons (particles made up of two or three quarks, including protons, neutrons and mesons), electrons and photons involved in, or released by, these collisions. The SPD will measure asymmetries in lepton pairs produced in collisions between protons, whether they are non-polarised or longtitudinally and transversally polarised. (Leptons are light elementary particles – electrons, muons, taus, their respective neutrinos and their six antiparticles.)

Within the framework of the Theory of Quantum Chromodynamics (which is concerned with the interactions of the elementary particles called quarks), Quark-Gluon Plasma, also known as Quark Soup, is a state of matter that is hot (incredibly hot, in fact) and dense and, according to the results of existing experiments, behaves much more like a liquid than the expected gas. Indeed, it behaves like an almost-perfect liquid with virtually no friction. In nature, this plasma is believed to have existed in the universe just – that is, fractions of a second – after the Big Bang. Many of the key features of the universe are believed to have been created during its Quark-Gluon Plasma phase. Shortly afterwards, these quarks and gluons would have combined to form protons, neutrons and mesons and then protons, neutrons and electrons would have combined to form atoms.