Just a few years ago, we witnessed how a national project, the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO), which is to study fundamental particles called neutrinos, was subject to a barrage of questions from environmentalists, politicians and others ever since it was cleared.
The project, which involved the construction of an underground laboratory, was initially to be located in the Nilgiris but later, on grounds that it was too close to a tiger habitat, was moved to a cave under a rocky mountain in the Bodi West Hills region of Theni district, about 110 km West of Madurai in Tamil Nadu.
The already much-delayed and important Physics project needs to be explained.
India has been among the pioneers in neutrino research, the first of such laboratories having been established in the 1960s. We led neutrino research when our physicists used a gold mine at Kolar in Karnataka to set up what was then the world's deepest underground laboratory. This was called the Kolar Gold Field Lab. In 1965, it enabled researchers to detect atmospheric neutrinos. In 1992, when the mine became uneconomical, the laboratory was shut down. With that, we lost our advantage in understanding the most mysterious particle in the universe. INO may reclaim this advantage and our global leadership.
Most of the advanced countries are already working vigorously in neutrino science with dedicated labs. These include the United States, Russia, France, Italy, China, Japan and South Korea. India is set to not only join this league, but also become a key player in global efforts in neutrino science. The Magnetised Iron Calorimeter (ICAL) being set up at INO will be among the largest ever in the world, weighing over 50000 tones.
Neutrinos, first proposed by Swiss Scientist Wolfgang Pauli in 1930, are the second most widely occurring particle in the universe, only second to photons, the particles which make up light. In fact, neutrinos are so abundant among us that every second, there are more than 100 trillion of them passing right through each of us - we never even notice them.
This is the reason, why INC needs to be built deep into the Earth - 1300 meters into the Earth. At this depth, it would be able to keep itself away from all the trillions of neutrinos produced in the atmosphere and which would otherwise choke an over-the-ground neutrino detector. Neutrinos have been in the universe literally since forever, being almost 14 billion years old -as much as the universe itself.
From experiments so far, we know that neutrinos have a tiny mass, but the ordering of the neutrino mass states is not known and is one of the key questions that remain unanswered till today. This is a major challenge which INO will try to resolve, thus completing our picture of the neutrino.
Neutrinos are very important for our scientific progress and technological growth for three reasons. First, they are abundant. Second, they have very little mass and no charge and hence can travel through planets, stars, rocks and human bodies without any interaction. In fact, a beam of trillions of neutrinos can travel thousands of kilometers through a rock before an interaction with a single atom of the rock and the neutrino occurs. Third, they hide within them a vast pool of knowledge and could open up new vistas in the fields of astronomy and astrophysics, communication and even in medical imaging, through the detector spin-offs. While this should be a moment of joy, there is also some skepticism, partly arising due to the fact that the neutrino, though so abundant, is a silent stranger to most people.
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