A top Russian government minister boasts that Russia's new ion collider currently being built outside Moscow should produce results spectacular enough to win the Nobel Prize in Physics when it becomes operational.

Russian Minister of Education and Science Dmitry Livanov was referring to "NICA" or the "Nuclotron-based Ion Collider fAcility." NICA is a new heavy ion collider designed at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) to study properties of dense baryonic matter.

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Once operational, NICA will allow JINR scientists to create in the laboratory the special state of matter that permeated the Universe shortly after the Big Bang some 14 billion years ago -- the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). It will make it possible to better study this high density state of matter.

"We can expect the results of the Nobel Prize level from this facility," said Livanov at a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and other members of the government.

Construction of the facility at the town of Dubna outside Moscow began this June. NICA is expected to become operational by 2020. Russia claims this accelerator has no equal in the world and revealed that over 1,000 scientists from 36 countries are involved in building the collider.

The NICA collider is a cyclotron with a circumference of 500 meters. It will accelerate and collide beams of protons and heavy ions, including relatively massive gold ions.

The kinetic energy of the accelerated ions should reach up to 4.5 GeV (gigaelectron volts) and 12.6 GeV for protons. The source of the beams for the new collider will be built on the basis of the Nuclotron accelerator constructed in 1993.

Livanov said the first phase of the collider's construction will be completed by 2018. About half the project's total funding of $284.7 million will be provided by participating countries. The other half will come from the Russian federal budget.

Livanov revealed that China and Brazil have show "substantial interest" in the heavy ion collider.

"There is substantial interest to the project dubbed NICA underway at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research. We are confident that both Chinese partners and partners from Brazil will become participants in this project," said Livanov.

"This is movement towards each other. We have many joint projects, potentially very interesting for all countries, and a great potential for broadening cooperation."

TagsNICA, Nuclotron-based Ion Collider fAcility, Russia, ion collider, Dmitry Livanov, Vladimir Putin, Quark-Gluon Plasma