Indian Scientists with CERN

Big-Bang echo in Calcutta - City scientists wait for ‘moment of truth’ G.S. MUDUR File picture of Chattopadhyay (circled) and his colleagues inside the Large Hadron Collider tunnel New Delhi, Sept. 9: Physicist Subhasis Chattopadhyay in Calcutta is waiting for his computer to flood with signatures of the fleeting antics of subatomic particles from the world’s largest experiment to begin tomorrow in an underground racecourse beneath Geneva. Chattopadhyay at Calcutta’s Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre (VECC) and his colleagues have built a device that will help track, count and study the behaviour of some of those subatomic particles. “All these years of waiting will be over. We’re heading for the moment of truth,” said Chattopadhyay. At 1230 IST tomorrow, the first proton beam will circulate along the 27km circumference of the tunnel of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The LHC is a giant underground machine whose primary aim is to find a subatomic particle called the Higgs Boson that could help the world’s physics community to complete a theory named the Standard Model that explains elementary particles. “The Higgs Boson is the missing piece of a puzzle. It explains the origin of mass of subatomic particles. If we find it, we can be sure of the standard model. If we don’t, then some chapters in physics may need to be rewritten,” said Chattopadhyay. "Either way, physics will gain," said Bikash Sinha, director of VECC and the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics (SINP), Calcutta. Researchers from the VECC, SINP, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, and several Indian universities are among 6,000 scientists from 50 countries who have participated in the LHC that took $8 billion and 10 years to build... Read  India has made major scientific and technological contribution to this new atom smasher also called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).  LHC is expected to answer several facts of fundamental nature of the universe that remains a mystery, said the scientists of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR). TIFR will be webcasting Wednesday's event in Geneva through its bandwidth, for the benefit of media as well as the scientists, Prof Atul Gurtu, senior scientist, department of high energy physics, TIFR said on Tuesday. Indian laboratories, led by Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology (RRCAT) at Indore, have contributed substantially towards construction of the accelerator (LHC) itself, with many components being fabricated by Indian industry and supplied to CERN, Gurtu said.   Two Indian teams are involved in different experiments. They included a scientist couple -- Sudhir Raniwala and his wife Rashmi-- from Jaipur. Sudhir Ranawala allayed safety fears about the high-speed collisions in the tunnel. "Cosmic rays in the universe send particles with much greater energies than those being achieved in the lab. So there is nothing to worry about," he said. ... Read