Article Posted on : - Oct 07, 2008

Despite hiccups, LHC is set for formal inauguration on Oct 21

KOLKOTA (PTI): Union Minister for Science and Technology Kapil Sibal will lead a high-level team of Indian scientists to the official inauguration of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Geneva, Director of VECC (Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre) and SINP (Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics), Prof Bikash Sinha, said on Monday.

From India, which is an observer state of CERN, Sibal, secretary DAE (Department of Atomic Energy) Anil Kakodkar, secretary DST (Department of Science and Technology) T Ramaswamy and Prof Sinha are expected to attend the inauguration.

CERN, an EU organisation studying high-level particle physics, is using the LHC for exploring the fundamentals of the origin of the universe starting from the Big Bang, Sinha told the media here.

“In the ALICE (one of the giant detectors) experiment, we have designed and installed the photon multiplicity detector which has its origin at Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre (VECC) and Muon Arm Project of Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics (SINP) in Kolkata,” he said.

Sinha said that these were major contributions to the experiment to detect photons and muons which are emitted from the collision.

One of the major problems in the endeavour was to collect and analyse a vast amount of data emerging from the experiment, Sinha said adding that it was estimated that about 45 petabytes (million gigabytes) of data would be collected annually by the experiments.

For this the concept of GRID computing, which was much ahead of the present internet computing, has emerged, which was computing infrastructure for seamless access to computing power and data distributed over the globe.

“In Kolkata, we have a Tier-2 setup for accessing data from ALICE experiment,” he said.