Success Stories

The city of Kharkiv has always been an important center for the study of nuclear physics and it was in Kharkiv on October 10, 1932 that the Soviet Union’s first nuclear reaction took place. During the Soviet era, the High Current Electronics Laboratory of V.N. Karazin Kharkov National University conducted work for the USSR Ministry of Defence on modeling of various nuclear reactions. However, after the collapse of the USSR, the laboratory’s staff were left unemployed since their funding, which came directly from Moscow, dried up. A problem arose in finding an application for the laboratory’s cumulative experience for applied scientific R&D. It was at this time that two projects were submitted to a competition announced by the STCU. Both of the projects were funded, one – at the second meeting of the STCU Governing Board, and the other one – at the fifth meeting.

These projects represented two lines of the laboratory’s research using super-high-powered pulse charged particle beams:

• creation of fundamentally new bremsstrahlung targets for generation of super-high-powered pulsed X-rays;
• techniques for the remote detection of nuclear weapon fissile materials.

Working with the STCU helped the laboratory obtain direct contacts with potential partners abroad. Thus, while participating in a scientific conference in Baltimore, USA, in 1997, Project Manager Dr. Valentyn Chornyi was invited to present a report at a seminar at the Defense Special Weapons Agency of the US Department of Defense (now the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), about the R&D work conducted in the laboratory. Since then, the DTRA has been their permanent partner in the research on physics of generation, transport, and convergence of superhigh- power electron beams. Collaboration is organized in such a way that research is carried out both at the Kharkiv National University and at the facilities of the US Naval Research Laboratory. New STCU Partnership project research will be conducted at the facilities of other US labs when project # 2093 is completed.

The Laboratory’s partner in working on the development of a technique for remote detection of nuclear weapons and their major components, such as Uranium -235 and Plutonium- 239, is Los Alamos National Laboratory, which is concerned with problems of the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Project No.329 entitled “Technique for Nuclear Warhead/Explosives Remote Detection” was financed with the support of this US-based facility. As a result of the implementation of this project’s methods it was proven that detecting fissile materials at a distance using a high-power probing neutron pulse at the energy of several hundred electron-volts was feasible.