CHENNAI: All is not lost for the underground India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO), which is proposed to come up in the Bodi East hills in Theni district. Scientists associated with the project met at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai on Monday as part of the annual INO collaboration meet and decided to make ‘fresh’ attempt to sensitise the Tamil Nadu government and the Centre to the importance of the project.
Scientists from around 10 research institutions, including Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, Physical Research Laboratory (PRL), Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre (VECC), Harish-Chandra Research Institute, Banaras Hindu University, Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Institute of Physics Bhubaneswar, Inter Institutional Centre for High Energy Physics ( IICHEP), Madurai and Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), were part of the crucial two-day meeting. The INO collaboration will be chalking out a detailed future course of action.
Prafulla Kumar Behera, associate professor, Department of Physics, IIT-M, told the Express over phone from Mumbai that a delegation would be led to meet the officials concerned both at the Centre and the State. “We know for sure the Centre is backing the project and the Tamil Nadu government has also supported the project initially. We will be making fresh moves and can’t afford to play wait and watch any more,” he said.
Behera said scientists from across the globe were supporting the project and wanted India to join the exciting domain, which was once dominated by India when the first detection of consmic-ray produced was in the Kolar Gold Field (KGF) experiment in 1965.
Meanwhile, the State government is likely to inform the status of the project to the southern bench of the National Green Tribunal (NGT) on October 28, when the case will be coming up for hearing.
What is INO project?
1. Construction of an underground laboratory and associated surface facilities at Pottipuram in Bodi West hills of Theni District of Tamil Nadu
2. Construction of an Iron Calorimeter (ICAL) detector for studying neutrinos, consisting of 50,000 tons of magnetised iron plates arranged in stacks with gaps in between where Resistive Plate Chambers (RPCs) would be inserted as active detectors
3. Setting up of National Centre for High Energy Physics at Madurai, for the operation and maintenance of the underground laboratory, human resource development and detector R&D along with its applications
4. The underground laboratory, consisting of a large cavern of size 132m X 26m X 20m and several smaller caverns, will be accessed by a 2100 m long and 7.5 m wide tunnel
India-born Oz physicist pledges support
India-born Australian physicist Chennupati Jagadish, who is currently the distinguished professor in the Department of Electronic Materials Engineering at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, has backed the INO project.
He told the Express that India, in order to assert itself as a global player, should invest in such projects. “These are curiosity-driven science project and often people say why tax payers’ money should be wasted in such projects. But, remember, today’s basic science is tomorrow’s applied science. I am happy that Nobel Prize in Physics was given to Arthus B McDonald of Queen’s University in Canada, where I did my post-doctoral fellowship, for demonstrating that neutrinos have mass. This innermost working of the matter can further be analysed and experimented through project like INO,” he said.