Samara Theoretical Physicists Participated in the 9th Meeting of the International SPD NICA Collaboration

The 9th meeting of the international SPD (Spin Physics Detector) collaboration took place in Armenia. The SPD detector is being developed to study spin effects in collisions of polarized proton and deuteron beams at the NICA accelerator complex.

During the meeting at the A. Alikhanian National Science Laboratory (AANL), scientists discussed the progress in constructing the experimental facility and exchanged experience and ideas on developing the collaboration.

Staff members of the scientific group from the Department of General and Theoretical Physics (GTP) at Samara University participated in the meeting and presented two reports.

Kirill Shilyaev, a postgraduate student at the department, delivered a report titled "J/psi production in the soft gluon resummation approach using the improved color-evaporation model", concerning the description of J/psi meson production cross-sections within the soft gluon resummation approach and the color-evaporation model. Measuring the cross-sections and spectra of J/psi mesons is one of the primary objectives of future SPD NICA collaboration experiments and theoretical predictions for observables are of significant practical importance for modeling these processes and calculating detector efficiency.

Vladimir Saleev, Head of the GTP Department and Professor, presented a report on "Pair production of D-mesons at small and large transverse momenta", discussing how paired D-meson production serves as a source of unique information about transverse-momentum-dependent gluon distribution functions in the proton.

Samara University has been an official member of the International SPD NICA Collaboration since 2023. The collaboration was established within the MegaScience Project of the NICA accelerator complex at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna. The goal of the SPD NICA collaboration is to investigate the nature of the proton's spin in collisions of polarized protons and deuterons at energies up to 27 GeV.

The Samara theoretical physics group participates in calculations and modeling of processes that will be studied in SPD NICA experiments. Additionally, a computational cluster is being established at Samara University, which will become part of the distributed computing system – the SPD NICA Grid.

Participants:

·         Vladimir Anatolyevich Saleev – Head of the GTP Department, Professor, D.Sc. (Physics and Mathematics)

·         Kirill Konstantinovich Shilyaev – Postgraduate student, GTP Department.