US lab seeks Indian hand in mega project

A team of over 20 scientists, mainly from US Department of Energy-funded Fermi Labs, Chicago, are trying to convince India to take a big lead in designing and building the International Linear Collidor

The dust had not even settled after Air Force One took off from New Delhi, when President Bush introduced in the US Congress last Friday the draft legislation to steer the civilian nuclear agreement. But that is not the only forward movement. A team of over 20 scientists, mainly from US Department of Energy-funded Fermi Labs, Chicago, are trying to convince India to take a big lead in designing and building the International Linear Collidor, a giant project that would cost about 8 billion.

8216;8216;India is seriously considering joining the project,8217;8217; said Dr V S Ramamurthy, a nuclear physicist and Secretary, Department of Science and Technology, who added, 8216;8216;Indian scientists are being wooed as if they were Aiswarya Rais by suitors from across the globe.8217;8217; In a way this is a step in removing the isolation that Indian scientists have been under after sanctions were imposed in 1974 and further tightened in 1998 after nuclear tests.

Fermi Labs director Dr Pier Oddone said, 8216;8216;We are learning a lot about this vast and astonishing country, and we are optimistic that a great collaboration will develop on the ILC as well as other projects relevant to Fermi Labs.8217;8217; Added Dr Carlo Pagani, chief of the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics, Milan, and a key name in accelerator physics research in the world: 8216;8216;It just might be advantageous for the world to house the project in India or China since the costs would be comparably less.8217;8217;

On Monday, teams of American scientists will hold detailed discussions at the IITs in Delhi and Mumbai and with scientists in IISc, Bangalore, on arriving at a consensus on the basic design of the accelerator. The international partners hope to finalise a blueprint by 2010 and then have the collidor up and running by 2017.

At the new International Linear Collidor, scientists hope to create for a fleeting second conditions similar to the Big Bang8212;the primordial event believed to have created the universe to see if they can find answers to the presumed existence of 8216;dark matter8217; and 8216;dark energy8217;, concepts that exist in theory but have escaped practical demonstration. The collidor will use 8216;cold technology8217;, with the entire 30 km stretch in a complete vacuum and at temperatures of about minus 270 degrees Celsius.

Accelerators are extreme precision machines where individual particles are propelled at up to the speed of light and then smashed with other particles. Through these collisions scientists try to unravel the most fundamental laws of physics. The largest accelerator, at 27 km, is the Large Hadron Collider LHC at CERN, Geneva. But there is already a feeling among physicists that they need a bigger and faster machine.

At LHC, there are over 50 scientists from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, and other atomic energy institutions. India has also contributed precision equipment worth Rs 80 crore to the centre. Several Indian scientists were members of the team that discovered the elusive sub atomic particle, the top quark, a few years ago.

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Dr Amit Roy, director of the Inter-University Accelerator Centre, New Delhi, host of Monday8217;s meeting, says, 8216;8216;The country can be a key player in the this challenging sector where technology is guarded.8217;8217; The largest accelerator in India is the pocket-sized 172-metre INDUS II at an atomic energy facility in Indore.