India is set to build the world’s largest magnet, which will be four times larger than the 12,500-tonne magnet housed in the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector at Cern in Geneva.
The Cern-like underground detector for the India-based Neutrino Observatory (NO) will be housed in Theni between Madurai and Kochi.
A 2-km underground tunnel is under construction at a cost of $250 million. An underground lab will also be constructed to conduct the research in particle physics.
The project is being implemented by the Bhabha Atomic Energy Research Centre (Barc) in association with several other institutes, including the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and the Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre based in Kolkata.
The project will study properties of neutrinos and use a magnetised iron calorimeter as a detector.
Minister of steel Beni Prasad Verma pointed out that 50,000 tonne of special steel for NO is being supplied by the Steel Authority of India (SAIL).
“SAIL will supply 50,000 soft iron plates for NO. A trial production of soft iron plates was taken up at the Bhilai steel plant as per the composition and process parameters decided upon jointly by Barc and SAIL,” said Verma.
The minister further added that “the NO detector will be a stack of 150 layers of magnetised iron plates. Each plate will be of 4 m X 2m in size and 5.8 cm thick. A total of 15,000 such plates would be needed to complete the INO detector.”
A trial production of soft iron plates that had been sent by Bhilai has been found acceptable by Barc.
The experiments will involve high-end technology on a scale that has not been tried out earlier. Barc hope to start work in 2017.
Apart from the steel plates, the construction of special glass for 30,000 particle detectors and nearly 3.5 million fabricated chips used for cutting edge electronics is also being outsourced.
The project is being funded by the Department of Atomic Energy and the Department of Science and Technology.