YerPhI Brief History
Brothers Abraham Alikhanov and Artem Alikhanyan founded Yerevan Physics Institute (YerPhI) in 1944 as a branch of the Yerevan State University. Later high-altitude Cosmic Ray stations were founded on the slopes of Mount Aragats. Among the key results of YerPhI in the early years were the discovery of protons and neutrons in cosmic rays, and the establishment of the first evidence of existence of the particles with masses between that of muons and protons. The high altitude research stations have remained the main research base of the Cosmic Ray Division (CRD) of YerPhI until now. Among the CRD achievements there were: discovery of sharp knee in light components of primary cosmic rays, detection of the highest energy protons
Traditional topic of YerPhI is the development of new particle detectors. Wide spark chambers and transition radiation detectors are examples of the experimental techniques developed and implemented in YerPhI. During the last years groups of scientists from Yerevan Physics Institute have actively participated in intermediate and high energy physics experiments abroad (JLAB, DESY, CERN-LHC, MAX-lab, MAMI), exploring the meson and nucleon structures, electromagnetic interactions of the nucleon, quark-hadron duality, short range nucleon-nucleon correlations, quark hadronization in nuclear medium, physics beyond standard model, Higgs boson searches, quark-gluon plasma, fission and fragmentation of nuclei and hypernuclei and many other topics, as well as constructing experimental hardware and develop the software for data acquisition and analysis.