India is all set to build the prestigious Neutrino Observatory (INO) in Tamil Nadu which, in terms of the size of the equipment, will outshadow the facility at Cern, Geneva, that shot into prominence last year with the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle.
“It will have the largest massive magnet (ever built) and its initial goal will be to study neutrons that go beyond the Standard Model,” said Dr Rajasekaran of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai.
This underground laboratory, will consist of a large cavern to be accessed by a 2,100-metre-long and 7.5-metre-wide tunnel. Its functiioning will be overseen by the National Centre for High Energy Physics near Madurai.
But it is facing a major impediment, said Dr Rajasekaran, “INO requires accelerator engineers and laser and plasma physicists. But this manpower is simply not available within the country. We will need 30,000 sensitive detectors and three million electronic channels to operationalise this project. Who will train these people to use this equipment?” he wondered.
Dr Rajashekaran suggested the solution was to do what Dr Homi Bhabha had done in the sixties: persuade Indian scientists working abroad to return, thereby creating an “inverse brain drain”.
Taking a dig at Dr Rolf Dieter Heuer, director general of Cern, who was present on the dias, Dr Rajashekaran obvserved, “The biggest loophole in the LHC collider’s discovery of the Boson Higgs particle is that it leaves out (the impact of) gravity as also the String Theory to which India has made substantial contributions.”
Dr Heuer admitted that the Higgs Boson discovery had left a number of unanswered questions. “We have achieved a breakthrough, but our real work has only just begun. We need to measure its interaction with other particles and also determine its properties.” Listing out some of the significant questions that scientists in Cern were working on, Dr Heuer said, “We want to find out what was the primordial state of matter after the Big Bang. Is it a scalar particle and once we find the Higgs particle how will our understanding of the universe change.”