Cabinet Committee approves high-end Neutrino project

NEW DELHI: India will soon join the global high-end scientific Neutrino Club as the Centre has given its nod to launch a project for experiments in high energy physics, an expert today said.

The Cabinet Committee on Security had cleared the project, which is to come up at Pottipuram village in Tamil Nadu, on December 26 last year, at an investment of Rs 1,500 crore, according to an official statement here.

The project will be funded jointly by Department of Science and Technology and Atomic Energy, while the infrastructure will be created with the help of Tamil Nadu government.

"We have to put the detector underground, because in the surface, there are other interactions, which will completely submerge the Neutrino event. That is why we have to go deep underground, where other particles get absorbed and we can measure the Neutrino," Naba K Mandal, Project Director of the India-based Neutrino Observatory and Inter Institutional Centre for High Energy Physics today said.

"Now with the formal approval for the project, we will really want to open the space for the international community to come and participate in the experiments or even propose new experiments. The experiment that we are doing is only the first experiment.

"There can be other experiments like on the dark matters. So India would like to invite the international community to come here and join us and participate so that this centre becomes a global hub for such things," Mondal said.

He was speaking at the sidelines of the Indian Science Congress held in Mumbai.

The underground project, which will come up near Pottipuram village in Theni district on the Tamil Nadu-Kerala border, will comprise a complex of caverns - the main cavern, which will house the current detector will be 130 meters long, 26 meters wide and 30 meter high.

There will be two smaller caverns to be used for setting up experiments for neutrino double detector and dark matters, Mondal said.

The complex will be approached by a 2-km long tunnel. The Inter Institutional Centre for High Energy Physics will come up in Madurai, about 110 km from the Observatory.

India will also seek international participation in the project, so that it turns out to be an international hub for high-end research like the CERN in Geneva, Mondal said.

He however, added, Indian participation in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project will continue.