KENDRAPARA: An Oriya scientist was among hundreds who participated in the much-published Big Bang experiment in Switzerland in September 2008. Dr Prafulla Kumar Behera (38) belongs to village Kamarkhandi on the outskirts of Kendrapara town in the district. Recently he visited his native village and vividly described his works on recreation of Big Bang. He also addressed students and teachers in a function and talked about Big Bang at Atlas (A toroidal LHC apparatus).
Atlas is a particle physics experiment at the large hadron collider at the headquarters of CERN (European Organisation for Nuclear Research) near Geneva, Switzerland, said Behera.
‘‘Atlas is a massive detector for particle physics and is one of the four detectors to collect data at the large hadron collider (LHC). The collider is placed 579 feet below the ground on France-Switzerland border. The Atlas detector is 148 feet long, 82 feet high and weighs 7,000 tonnes -- approximately the same weight as the Eiffel Tower,’’ added Behera.
Designed to record and explore what happens when protons collide at nearly the speed of light, Atlas will collect a staggering amount of data, enough to fill 100,000 data CDs per second or roughly equivalent to 50 billion phone calls being made at the same instant.
‘‘I have been part of the project since 2006 from the University of Iowa, Iowa City, USA. Since late 2007, I have been stationed at CERN, involved in the commissioning of the innermost detector called silicon pixel detector,’’ said Behera. The LHC was turned on successfully on September 10, 2008.
Behera read in Icchapur High School in Kendrapada. After completing HSC, he read in Kendrapara college. Later he passed M.Sc from Utkal University and worked as a post-doctoral fellow in University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA. Now he is working at University of Iowa as assistant research scientist.