One can appreciate the importance of this statement taking into account that at this moment in the world exist only a dozen of high energy experiments: 2 in RHIC (Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider) inUSA, 6 at LHC (Large Hadron Collider) and 4 at SPS (Super Proton Synchrotron) in CERN, Europe. The SHINE is the only existing device for wide acceptance hadron spectroscopy in the energy range 30-450 GeV.
The SHINE experiment was created by the reuse of the remnants of the finished NA49 experiment. Hungarian physicist are playing leading role in exploitation of this equipment:
The technical coordinator is Zoltán FODOR, who was able to revive the old components and guide the complex modernization process. He serves also as Safety Officer of SHINE.
The biggest Hungarian contribution to SHINE was the building a completely new DAQ (Data AcQuisition) system, which is ten times faster than the old one. Thus now one can finish an experiment during one year, which had required 10 years of running of the old device. The DAQ was designed, produced, installed by the Budapest group. It is based on the DDL communication protocol which was produced in Hungary for the LHC ALICE detector. The work was done by Ervin DÉNES, Tivadar KISS and Tamás TÖLYHI.,
Other hardware component provided by Krisztina MÁRTON and Dezső VARGA is the LMPD (Low Momentum Particle Detector). This small time projection chamber unit has been added to the NA61 setup in 2012. The LMPD considerably extends the detector acceptance towards the backward region, surrounding the target in hadron-nucleus interactions. The LMPD features simultaneous range and ionization measurements, which allows for particle identification and momentum measurement in the 0.1– 0.25 GeV/c momentum range for protons. The possibility of Z=1 particle identification in this range is directly demonstrated.
Especially important achievement was the preparation of the ONLINE software which was written and debugged just in one year by a single person, András LÁSZLÓ, who was also one of the leaders of the OFFLINE software.

Unfortunately the funding from Hungary was disappeared, thus now one can continue the Budapest participation only along private lines.

Physics program

The NA61/SHINE physics program has been designed to measure hadron production in three different types of collisions:

• In nucleus–nucleus (heavy ion) collisions, in particular the measurement of fluctuations and long range correlations, with the aim to identify the properties of the onset of deconfinement and find evidence for the critical point of strongly interacting matter.
  
• In proton–proton and proton–nucleus interactions needed as reference data for better understanding of nucleus–nucleus reactions; in particular with regards to correlations, fluctuations and high transverse momenta.
  
• In hadron–nucleus interactions needed for neutrino (T2K) and cosmic-ray experiments (Pierre Auger Observatoryand KASCADE).
  

Detector

The NA61/SHINE experiment uses a large acceptance hadron spectrometer located on the H2 beam line in the North Area of CERN.[1] It consist of components used by the heavy ion NA49 experiment as well as those designed and constructed for NA61/SHINE.[2]
The main tracking devices are four large volume time projection chambers (TPCs), which are capable of detecting up to 70% of all charged particles created in the studied reactions. Two of them, the vertex TPCs, are located in the magnetic field of two super-conducting dipole magnets with maximum bending powers of 9 Tesla meters. Two others (MTPC-L and MTPC-R) are positioned downstream of the magnets symmetrically with respect to the beam line. One additional small TPC, the gap TPC, is installed on the beam axis between the vertex TPCs. The setup is supplemented by time of flight detector walls, which extend particle identification to low momenta (1 GeV/c < p ). Furthermore, the Projectile Spectator Detector (a calorimeter) is positioned downstream of the time of flight detectors to measure energy of projectile fragments.

More details on webpage: http://home.web.cern.ch/about/experiments/na61shine