NUSTAR Week 2012 in Kolkata

30.10.2012 | 

The NUSTAR Collaboration met in Kolkata, India, from October 8-12 to hold the NUSTAR Week 2012. This was the fourth meeting in a series, taking place before in Dubna (2009), Lund (2010), and Bucharest (2011), this time hosted by the Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre (VECC) in Kolkata.

The aim of the NUSTAR Week meeting is to discuss within the collaboration research and development issues, hold working group meetings of the NUSTAR projects, present new technical results, plan common activities, and discuss perspective instrumentation ideas. The meeting comprised reports from sub-collaborations and common working groups, discussions on technical designs and plenary physics presentations. More than 100 members of the FAIR scientific collaboration attended the NUSTAR Week 2012 and made it a very lively meeting.

The audience was impressed by the progress achieved within the last year, with the first experiments being already operational in their early implementation. Other components are in construction or at least in prototyping stage with Technical Design Reports soon to be submitted. When the Super-FRS will go on-line NUSTAR will be able to start its scientific program contributing the first nuclear physics results of the FAIR facility.

One highlight was the NUSTAR-India Day, during which the Indian groups gave detailed reports on outstanding technical developments towards components for the NUSTAR experiments and the Super-FRS including the buncher-spectrometer dedicated for the low-energy branch. Prof. Sibaji Raha (Bose Institute, Kolkata and Vice-Chair of the FAIR Council) and Prof. V.S. Ramamurthy (NIAS Bangalore, member of the FAIR Scientific Council) addressed the participants along with Prof. Rakesh Bhandari (VECC Kolkata, member of the FAIR In-kind Review Board (IKRB) and FAIR Machine Advisory Board (MAC)). All pointed out the commitment of India to FAIR and NUSTAR and stressed the importance of the participation of India in the FAIR project right from the start.