GENEVA: Even as scientists celebrate the initial success of the experiment to understanding the makeup of the universe, there is recognition coming India's way for the big contribution to it made by Indian scientists. The world's largest particle collider passed its first major test by firing a beam of protons around a 27-kilometer underground ring in what scientists hope is the next great step to understanding the makeup of the universe.
After a series of trial runs, two white dots flashed on a computer screen indicating that the protons had traveled the full length of USD 3.8 billion Large Hadron Collider, described as the biggest physics experiment in history. India was given the responsibility of providing key equipment for the $3.8 billion (Rs 16,340 crore) Big Bang experiment on the outskirts of Geneva by CERN or the European Organisation for Nuclear Research - the world's largest particle physics laboratory. India provided 1,848 corrector magnets. This is half the number of the magnets required for the Big Bang project.
"All of them worked as they ought to," said Vinod C Sahni, director of India's Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology (CAT). "It has been a fascinating and rewarding experience for us. I extend our best wishes to CERN for a productive run with the LHC machine in the years to come." CAT is the nodal agency which did the bulk of the work on the Large Hadron Collider project or the Big Bang experiment. When India was entrusted this task, laboratories around the world doubted whether India could accomplish the task. With the impressive show put up by the Indian scientists at CERN, a new interest is developing in the country's scientific talent pool.
Top international labs have already approached India with requests for scientific inputs to their projects. Even America's foremost particle physics agency, the Fermi National Accelerator Lab, has sent in inquiries about Indian know-how have now come from the Fermi National Accelerator Lab Sahni said that "Impressed by our precision work, Fermi director Pier Oddone has sent feelers seeking to explore ways of co-operation.
Inquiries have also come from the International Linear Collider Steering Committee, another multinational physics project aiming at an even bigger experiment. Celebrating success After the beam completed its lap in the Big Bang experiment, project leader Lyn Evans exclaimed, "There it is." Champagne corks popped in labs as far away as Chicago, where contributing and competing scientists watched the proceedings by satellite. Physicists around the world now have much greater power to smash the components of atoms together in attempts to learn about their structure.
"Well done, everybody," said Robert Aymar, Director-general of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, to cheers from the assembled scientists in the collider's control room at the Swiss-French border. Now that the beam has been successfully tested in a clockwise direction, CERN plans to send it counterclockwise. Eventually two beams will be fired in opposite directions with the aim of recreating conditions a split second after the big bang, which scientists theorize was the massive explosion that created the universe. "My first thought was relief," said Evans, who has been working on the project since its inception in 1984. "This is a machine of enormous complexity.
Things can go wrong at any time. But this morning has been a great start." He didn't want to set a date but said that he expected scientists would be able to conduct collisions for their experiments "within a few months". The collider is designed to push the proton beam close to the speed of light, whizzing 11,000 times a second around the tunnel. Scientists hope to eventually send two beams of protons through two tubes about the width of fire hoses, speeding through a vacuum that is colder and emptier than outer space. The paths of these beams will cross, and a few protons will collide.
The collider's two largest detectors, essentially huge digital cameras weighing thousands of tons, are capable of taking millions of snapshots a second. The CERN experiments could reveal more about "dark matter," antimatter and possibly hidden dimensions of space and time. It could also find evidence of the hypothetical particle, the Higgs boson, which is sometimes called the "God particle" because it is believed to give mass to all other particles, and thus to matter that makes up the universe.
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