BackIndian institutes working on the next big thing in particle accelerators
The Belle II detector that will observe the particles created in the collisions has been designed by a team of more than 600 scientists, including from India
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New Delhi: Japan’s SuperKEKB accelerator, the world’s newest atom smasher, achieved its “first turns" after circulating beams of particles for the first time, and in doing so opened a new window to the fundamental nature of the universe.
Indian institutes such as the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Mohali, Panjab University, Punjab Agricultural University and four Indian Institutes of Technology are involved in the project while the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) is making a substantial contribution to the construction of part the accelerator.
SuperKEKB, along with the Belle II detector, is a facility designed to search for New Physics, a model that goes beyond the Standard Model of Particle Physics.
“The rate at which we produce particle collisions is much higher than in other machines; the rate at which we produce quark matter is at a much higher rate than previously done," said Jim Libby, associate professor at Indian Institute of Technology Madras and convener of a Belle II working group.
“This accelerator is the highest luminosity machine ever built. Basically instead of probing things by putting in more energy like the Large Hadron Collider, we can do it by producing a larger number of things," Libby added.
Located at the KEK Laboratory in Tsukuba, Japan, the collider was designed and created by a team of Japanese accelerator physicists. SuperKEKB will have the highest intensity of any accelerator, 40 times greater than its KEK predecessor. This would mean the collider will create more collisions of interest than any other collider on the planet.
The Belle II detector that will observe the particles created in the collisions has been designed by a team of more than 600 scientists, spanning across 99 institutions in 23 countries, including from India.
“Global cooperation is necessary to address the most compelling questions in particle physics," said James Siegrist, associate director of science for high energy physics in the US department of energy’s office of science. “Now nations must specialise in the facilities that they build and provide access to those facilities to physicists from around the world," he added in a press release.
Some of the questions that continue to perplex physicists are related to the existence of antimatter, matter and dark matter. Studying the particles produced in these collisions will give physicists a clearer view of the fundamental building blocks of the universe and enable them to go beyond the Standard Model of Particle Physics which still leaves many questions unanswered.
“Goals are to study some very rare processes that happen with quarks... New Physics could answer questions about dark matter, why there are light, medium and heavy particles. The same fundamental questions as Large Hadron Collider, just that we will be probing them in a very different manner," Libby said.
The TIFR engineers are working on the tracking detector which measures the trajectories of the particles that are produced by the collisions.
The ‘first turns’ are considered a major milestone for any new particle accelerator. The facility will be fully operational by 2018.
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