At the moment (2008), the focus areas are theoretical and mathematical physics (e.g. quantum field theory and string theory), astrophysics, elementary particle physics (e.g. they are involved in working with DESY and CERN experiments), nuclear physics, plasma physics, solid state physics, nanotechnologies, nuclear reactor technology, accelerator physics, medical physics (such as PET devices, cancer treatment with the proton accelerator) and computer science. They were one of the first Russian institutes networked on the World Wide Web and operate the Moscow mirror of the Arxiv preprint server.