Initiatives in national and international collaborations at Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre

Over the last two decades VECC scientists, under the leadership of their director Bikash Sinha, have pursued experimental physics studies under international collaboration programmes, which would not have been possible with the existing facilities at home. The collaboration extended from RIKEN (Japan) in the east to CERN (Switzerland) in the west. It spanned the energy scales from a few tens of MeV per nucleon to several hundred GeV per nucleon and the physics topics on one extreme being the structure of exotic nuclei and their decay modes and on other extreme being the phase transition of hadronic matter and the formation of quark gluon plasma. The dynamic leadership of Dr. Sinha not only helped to shed the initial inhibitions towards such activities, going beyond the national frontiers, but also gave a new dimension to the experimental physics research in the country. It helped to organize an Indian team of scientists from various national institutes and universities. It paved way for full scale funding of the projects and set the trend that enabled many other Indian groups to join several international collaborations in various fields. Here we reflect on the evolution of these national and international collaboration programmes and the physics, technological and sociological benefits resulting from these activities. (author)