Nobel laureate supports India’s pursuit for a neutrino lab

Nobel laureate supports India’s pursuit for a neutrino lab

Subject: Science and tech

Sec: Space sector

Context:

Nobel laureate Takaaki Kajita opens up about the parallels and contrasts between Japan and India’s quests to further research on enigmatic elementary particles called neutrinos.

More About News:

• About 60 years ago, historic science experiments inside a goldmine in Kolar, Karnataka, would lead to the 1965 discovery of atmospheric neutrinos. This was a collaboration between Indian, Japanese and British scientists.
• Japan continued with experiments on or rather, under their soil, in the underground Kamioka Observatory situated under Mount Ikeno. This was where Masatoshi Koshiba’s team would discover cosmic neutrinos in the late
• Japan established a dedicated neutrino observatory, Super-Kamiokande, which began operation in 1996. In 2002, Koshiba won a Nobel Prize for his contributions.
• A proposal was drawn and in 2011, the Indian government announced its intention to set aside about 1,350 crores for an India-based Neutrino Observatory, which would be situated 1.3 km underground in Tamil Nadu. Over a decade later, there has been no progress.
• Japanese researchers received the first evidence for a phenomenon called neutrino oscillation within a year of the Super-Kamiokande. This discovery would go on to (jointly) win Koshiba’s student Takaaki Kajita, another Nobel in 2015.

Two of the main reasons for opposition to INO:

1. Environmental impacts: The observatory would be located a kilometre underground and hence would have minimal impact on wildlife and the ecosystem.
2. Fear of radioactivity

What about radioactivity?

• The experiment will neither produce any radioactivity nor can it function well where there is radiation.
• The whole point of housing the detector underground is to protect it from the natural radiation that hits the surface of Earth.
• The original experiment was designed to search not for neutrinos but for a hypothetical phenomenon called proton decay.
• The biggest stroke of luck for the Japanese neutrino scientists was the timing of a supernova that was observed in February 1987.
• The Supernova 1987A happened while the Kamiokande-II detector was online, leading to the discovery of cosmic neutrinos by the team led by Koshiba. This had a great impact.
• A neutrino observatory at home is envisioned to give the Indian scientific community, including students of particle physics, the opportunity to work with a world-class detector without needing to travel outside national borders.
• INO dream is worth salvaging.

What is a neutrino?

• Neutrinos are the smallest particles that form the universe.
• Neutrinos which are elementary particles have no charge and almost no mass and therefore do not affect anything they pass through.
• They are naturally produced in the atmosphere of the Earth and are present around us at all times, causing no damage.

About Indian Neutrino Observatory:

• INO Project is a multi-institutional effort aimed at building a world-class underground laboratory with a rock cover of approx. 1200 m for non-accelerator based high energy and nuclear physics research in India.
• The proposed site is spread across Kerala and Tamil Nadu.
• It is funded by Dept. of Atomic Energy (DAE) and the Dept. of Science and Technology (DST).
• Objectives: INO will observe neutrinos and antineutrinos produced in the atmosphere of the Earth.
  • This observation will tell us more about the properties of neutrino particles, whose main source is the Sun and the Earth’s atmosphere.
• The project includes:
  • Underground laboratory and associated surface facilities at Bodi West Hills.
  • Construction of a magnetized Iron Calorimeter (ICAL) detector for studying neutrinos. When completed, ICAL will have the world’s largest magnet.
  • Setting up Inter Institutional Centre for High Energy Physics (IICHEP) at Madurai

What’s special about locating the INO in the South?

• A project report says most of the neutrino detectors are at latitudes over 35 deg.
• It is possible to push such a detector down to almost 8 deg latitude in South India, within proximity to the Equator.
• This permits neutrino astronomy searches covering the whole celestial sky and study of solar neutrinos passing through the Earth’s core.

Periyar Tiger Reserve:

• It falls in the districts of Idukki and Pathanamthitta in Kerala (southern region of Western Ghats).
• Declared a Sanctuary during 1950 and Tiger Reserve in 1978.
• It gets its name from the River Periyar which has its origin deep inside the reserve.

Mathikettan Shola National Park:

• Mathikettan Shola National Park is a national park in Poopara village in Idukki district of Kerala.
• Considering the unique nature of the shola forest in Mathikettan and its importance as an elephant strip, the state government has declared it as a National park in 2008.