Participating countries and international organizations:
Belarus, Czech Republic, Japan, Russia, Ukraine. 

Issues addressed and main goals of research:
Strangeness in hadronic matter and study of boundary effects: 
study of stabilizing effects of strangeness in nuclear matter and properties of the lightest hypernuclei; 
study of multi-particle dynamics in inelastic proton-proton and proton-nucleus interactions with extremally high multiplicity; 
study of spectra and yields of soft photons in deuteron-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus interactions. 

Expected results: 

• Experimental conclusion about existence of the hypernucleus ⁶H  . 
  
  
• New experimental data on properties of the lightest hypernuclei and experimental verification of corresponding theoretical models for such hypernuclei. 
  
  
• New experimental data about the drip-line location for loosely bound light hypernuclei with high neutron excess, necessary for development of the theory of the neutron-rich hypernuclei and models of their production in non-central nucleus-nucleus interactions. 
  
  
• Comparison of the energy spectra (in the region of several MeV) of protons, emitted in interactions with nuclear targets of various (from deuterons to heavy nuclei) nuclear beams from the Nuclotron and measured at different multiplicity of charged and neutral particles as well as at different emission angles of such photons, with theoretical predictions. Verification of various physical hypotheses about emission of the "direct" photons in nuclei-nuclei interactions. 
  <br
• Experimental estimation (or determination of upper limit) of cross sections for production of new hypothetical resonances, decaying via 2 mode. Determination of conditions for pion condensate formation at the high multiplicity region by momentum spectra.

Expected major results in the current year:

• Upgrade of the tracking system of the HyperNIS magnetic spectrometer by installing additional planes of GEM detectors. 
  
  
• Analysis of data from LEPS spectormeter on vector-meson photoproduction by polarized photons. 
  
  
• Monte-Carlo simulation of performance of the 2-arm electromagnetic calorimeter ("shashlyk"-type, 9 modules and the BGO-crystal based 2-nd calorimeter), to be installed at the SVD-2 setup. Production of the necessary FE-electronics with low gamma-detection threshold (~ 5-8 MeV) for this calorimeter. 
  
  
• Production of the pre-shower and a movable support for the EM-calorimeter (with 9 modules) for their integration into the SVD-2 setup. Calibration of the EM modules at low energy beams of electron accelerators (DLNP of JINR, INR RAS (Troitsk)). 
  
  
• Preparation of the experiment NEMAN project aimed on study of photon emission in non-central collisions of relativistic (with kinetic energies above 1 GeV/nucleon) light and heavy nuclei with nuclei at the SVD-2 setup.