The world's most powerful physics experiment that completed its first major test today in Europe breathes an Indian link with 30 scientists from India.
MUMBAI: The world's most powerful physics experiment that completed its first major test today in Europe breathes an Indian link with 30 scientists from India including a couple also behind the attempt to replicate the "Big Bang" that created the Universe 13.7 billion years ago.
The Indian flag flew high when the world's largest particle collider successfully fired a beam of protons all the way around a 27-km tunnel on the France-Switzerland border near Geneva in an attempt to unlock the secrets of the universe and study its formation.
Around 200 of the 2,000 scientists involved in the ten billion dollar multi-nation 'mother of all experiments' are of Indian origin.
India has made major scientific and technological contribution to this new atom smasher also called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), according to scientists of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR). LHC is expected to answer several facts of fundamental nature of the universe that remains a mystery after the World's costliest experiment.
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, Prof Atul Gurtu, senior scientist, department of high energy physics, TIFR said.
In the scientific side, two Indian teams are involved in different experiments. They included a scientist couple - Sudhir Raniwala and his wife Rashmi-- from Jaipur. They are Associate Professors.
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.
Sudhir Raniwala said the 'Big Bang' experiment is a great technological advance. "No matter what the results are, either it confirms certain things that we believe today or it refutes certain things that we believe today."
"It is an intellectual stimulation that goes on that we try to unravel what the nature had unfoled for us," he said.
Prof Raghav Verma of Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, representing Indian scientists, has carried an Indian flag, IIT sources said.
Asked about the role of Indian scientists, Gurtu said they have been active in this field and had collaborations with their counterparts at CERN and Fermilab.
However, it is for the first time that a concerted, coordinated and comprehensive contribution has been made by India towards such a huge international scientific program, he said.
One Indian team is participating in the CMS experiment with TIFR as the nodal institution and includes scientists from BARC, Delhi, Punjab and Vishwa Bharati universities.
The other team is in the ALICE experiment with VECC/SINP (Kolkata) as the nodal institutions and IOP, IITB, Jammu, Rajasthan, Aligarh and Punjab universities.
Gurtu said the scientific goals are truly stupendous, ranging from understanding the microcosm of the sub-nuclear world to attempting to answer the question what was the universe like at the very beginning of time, a few moments after the big bang.
The entire system in the 27-km-long Large Hadron Collider comprising 1,232 cryo-magnets,each weighing about 32 tones, is sitting on precision motion positioning systems developed among other places at the Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced technology(RRCAT), Indore by Electronics Corp of India.
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