Nod for Rs1,500 cr underground research lab in Tamil Nadu

New Delhi: project to build India’s largest underground laboratory for advanced research into the smallest particle known to man was cleared by the prime minister’s office on Monday in a move that could make India a major nuclear physics research hub.

The India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) will aim to study the properties of atmospheric neutrinos, which are subatomic particles produced by the decay of radioactive elements.

These elementary particles lack an electric charge and are the tiniest and lightest, and almost weightless, particles ever discovered. “The project has been approved at a cost of Rs.1,500 crore. Till now we were in the R&D (research and development) phase and now we can move to the construction phase in about six months,” said Naba K. Mondal, project director of the INO at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR).

“It will be a huge challenge, making an underground tavern and will be the largest underground lab in India. Developing the technology for the detector will also be a huge challenge. We need to find an industrial partner to make the components,” he added.

The project involves building an underground laboratory with a rock cover of approximately 1200 metres—to be accessed by a 2km-long and 7.5metre-wide tunnel at Pottipuram in the Bodi West hills of Theni district in Tamil Nadu.

Scientists and engineers will also construct an Iron Calorimeter (ICAL) detector, an equipment consisting of tonnes of magnetized iron plates arranged in a stack, for studying neutrinos. In addition, a national centre for high-energy physics will be set up at Madurai for the operation and maintenance of the laboratory, human resource development and detector research and development.

“There are around 100 physicists and engineers involved in the project,” Mondal said. “A 50 kilotonne magnet will be made using a stack of iron plates which will be magnetized using a huge current. There is also the task of making the particle detectors which will be each a square of 2x2 metres and we have to make 30,000 of these. It is an enormous task."

“Determination of neutrino properties is one of the most significant open problems in physics today,” according to the government’s project proposal.

“Such studies will help us in understanding the interactions among subatomic particles at a very small scale.... The project will put India back on the world-map of underground science, a position that was held by India during the second half of the 20th century."

According to the University of Wisconsin-Madison website, a majority of neutrinos were born around 15 billion years ago, soon after the birth of the universe.

While the universe has continuously expanded and cooled, the original neutrinos have just kept going.

Other neutrinos are constantly being produced from nuclear power stations, particle accelerators, nuclear bombs, general atmospheric phenomena, and during the births, collisions and deaths of stars, particularly explosions of supernovae.

Conceptualized more than a decade back, the INO was cleared by the ministry of environment and forests (MoEF) in October 2010.

Proposed to be set up under the department of atomic energy and the department of science and technology, the INO is a collaboration between the country’s 21 premier research institutes, including the TIFR in Mumbai, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Mumbail; Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai; Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Kolkata; Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre, Kolkata; Harish Chandra Research Institute, Allahabad; and Institute of Physics, Bhubaneswar.

Disclaimer: This information has been collected through secondary research and IBEF is not responsible for any errors in the same.