Star of the Orient

India’s first particle physics observatory is to be constructed in the district of Theni in Tamil Nadu at an expense of Rs. 1,200 crore (USD 250 million). Called the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO), the entire experiment will be situated 1.3 km under a hill to keep other radiations and cosmic rays from interfering with the study. This is because the neutrinos that the detector will be studying rarely interact with matter and pass through it at the rate of three or four interactions per nearly 85 trillion trillion trillion. The gouging of a tunnel 7m wide and 1.9km long for accessing the cavern that will house the systems was commenced on October 14, Friday, and is expected to take a year.

Twenty-seven days ago, a startling discovery set off tremors across the scientific community when the Gran Sasso National Laboratory inItalyreported that certain fundamental particles called neutrinos had been observed moving faster than light. The reason this observation caused such dissonance and a flurry of excitement is that, according to the physics megagiant Albert Einstein, the Universe would allow nothing to travel faster than light.

Then again, conclusive proof was not presented by the physicists at the lab—at least, not anything that was within the infamous six-sigma accuracy tolerance limit: 99.99999 per cent. It was little surprise, then, that within a week of the report, engineers were working in full-swing atJapan's Kamioka reactor, at theUSA's dreaded Fermilab, at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory inCanada, to recreate the conditions at Gran Sasso. Far away, in India, a country that had until then been the principle centre for processing second-hand information, a 22-year old plan was finally being mobilized.

With just a 29-year old history, the energy frontier of physics research was supposed to last at least until 2018—the year of the Super Large Hadron Collider. With such unprecedented discoveries, however, a shift away from high-energy research and toward ultra-rare processes has become conspicuous. For the INO, the timing couldn’t have been better.

The decision to locate the observatory at Theni was finalized after evaluating the local topography, seismic stability, environmental disturbance, rock quality, availability of electricity and water, and rain patterns. In order to further minimize the impact of the project’s logistical and infrastructural operations, an extant but little-used road is being re-laid for the trucks and earthmovers to use, instead of having them move through five villages.

Funded by the government of India and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), and coordinated by the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMS), the INO will host a supersensitive static detector called the Iron Calorimeter (ICAL), incorporating a magnet exactly four times as large as the one in use at the Large Hadron Collider. Such an effort will involve the INO-industry interface in a big way, drawing heavily on available industrial infrastructure, in issues related to mechanical structure, electronics and detector-related technology.

The detector will consist of a stack of alternating plates of iron and borosilicate glass, each totally numbering 30,000 and measuring 12m to a side. The glass plates, in turn, will consist of glass sheets with a noble gas sandwiched in between—an arrangement referred to collectively as a resistive plate chamber (RPC). When a neutrino interacts with iron, it will knock out an electron from its orbit around an atom and send it into the RPC. Once there, the electron will be picked up by positively charged electrodes sewn into the glass, translated into a signal, and sent to the data processors.

The source of the neutrinos will be the sun, supernovae, cosmic rays and other intergalactic phenomena, and the output will correspond to the particle’s mass, position of interaction, velocity, type, degree of oscillation and charge.

There are two reasons the INO stands out from its peers: the first is that the ICAL is going to be devoted to studying neutrinos and neutrinos only, and the second is that the ICAL will study them continuously without stopping (except for scheduled maintenance). Because of such principled and technical dedication, physicists expect the detector to shine light on some of the more elusive characteristics of neutrinos, such as flavour oscillations and neutrino-neutrino interactions.

These are boom times for Indian science. The national spending on science and technology has gone up in the last five years and is inching towards two per cent ofIndia's GDP. Hordes of new institutes are coming up in the nook and corner of the country—30 new central universities, 5 new Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research, 8 new Indian Institutes of Technology and 20 new Indian Institutes of Information Technology are in various stages of conception and completion.

However, simply increasing the number of institutes will not lead to better scientific prowess. The education system needs a complete rethink in order to attract more students to science and produce world class scientists (the last home-grown scientist to win a Nobel Prize was Sir C. V. Raman in 1930). In this direction, the INO is a giant leap forward because of its capacity to sustain research in subjects at the energy and cosmic frontiers, because of the special and exotic experimentation environments it will support, and because of the invaluable access it will provide to the Indian scientific community to cutting-edge information.