neutrino

Tamil Nadu

The, an elusive subatomic particle, is making a great deal of noise in. The state is to host perhaps the most ambitious basic science project in India; protesters willing, that isThe receptionist at my Madurai hotel comes up blank when I ask him if I can hire a car to take me to T Pudukottai in Pottipuram panchayat, 30 kilometres beyond Theni town. That’s where the big science project is coming up I tell him. “Oh, neutrino?” he says. The neutrino’s impressive name-recognition here is largely owing to outreach from Indian Neutrino Observatory (INO) scientists, and more likely television coverage of politicians and activists agitating against the project. Car arranged, I’m on my way to the INO site. It’s around 110 km from Madurai, in the Bodi West Hills along the border of Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Travelling from Madurai, the outline of the Western Ghats come into distant view near Theni. In the foreground are coconut trees, scattered windmills. From there it’s a sequence of successively narrow roads that lead to the village of Pudukottai. A mountain stands large behind it.The plan is for a two-kilometre-long tunnel to burrow deep into the mountain, at the end of which will be built a laboratory in a cavern. The host institution for the collaboration is the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai, and others associated include IITs, state universities and national science institutions. A hundred researchers from 22 institutions are already involved with the project. The INO was mooted in 2000 and has since then been in planning. The Rs 1,500-crore project, supported by the Department of Science and Technology and the Department of Atomic Energy, with land and infrastructure support from the government of Tamil Nadu, was approved by the union government in January this year.Hundreds of billions of neutrinos would have passed through you in the time taken to read this sentence. Despite this abundance, the neutrino is a fiendishly elusive particle. It has only the tiniest of masses. It has no charge. And it whizzes along at very nearly the speed of light. Most peculiar of all, the neutrino is a hopelessly shy particle, refusing to interact with matter and passing through nearly everything in its path. These properties taken together make the neutrino incredibly hard to detect. There are a humongous number of them and they are everywhere — but how do you find something that stops for nothing and, is for all practical purposes, invisible?By looking very, very hard. In 1930, the physicist Wolfgang Pauli first suggested that such a particle had to exist. But its properties rendered it so elusive that he bet his friend a case of champagne that it would never actually be found. It was — 26 years later. The scientists who found it, Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowan, made use of the fact that a neutrino will — very rarely — collide with another subatomic particle and leave a trace. They did their experiments near a nuclear reactor where 50 trillion neutrinos were passing per second through each square centimetre of a large water tank, and used extremely sensitive instruments to spot the aftermath of interactions. They were able to detect three neutrinos per hour.It is because neutrino experiments are so sensitive that they need to be shielded from cosmic rays that would otherwise flood the detectors with noise. Hence their out-of-the-way locations. Cosmic rays cannot penetrate through dense rock, but neutrinos easily do. So, many detectors are built in deep mines or tunnels. At the INO, the detector will be shielded by dense rock at least a kilometre thick in all directions.It’s about two kilometres from Pudukottai to the INO site. The cart track yields to a broad road under construction that leads up to the mountain (called Ambarappar by those who live near it). The site is, at the moment, a fenced-off area at the base with only a water tank inside. By the side of the road, a herd of cattle root among the scrub. The mountain is lightly greened and has a large outcrop of dark, dense rock. The rock here is a Charnockite, among the strongest there is. Its stability is part of the reason the site was chosen, other reasons being low seismic activity and low moisture that offers better operating conditions for the detectors.Neutrinos come from distant galaxies, from the sun, from the depths of the earth, and anywhere there is action involving the nuclei of atoms. The kind of neutrinos to be studied in the INO are atmospheric neutrinos, created when cosmic rays strike the air around the earth. These neutrinos were first detected in 1965 in a lab deep in a mine at Kolar Gold Fields, in Karnataka.(The lab closed along with the mine in the 1990s.) When — if — work is complete, the INO will house what is a massive stakeout for neutrinos — a 50-kiloton iron calorimeter consisting of magnetised iron plates interleaved with glass layers of particle detectors. The structure will be around 15 metres high and roughly the length and breadth of an Olympic-sized swimming pool.When a neutrino from the atmosphere interacts with an iron plate here, it will generate a charged particle called a muon that can be tracked and its properties measured. Thirty thousand detectors will send signals through 3.7 million channels of electronics to be stored on a computer for analysis that could answer several critical physics questions.The INO’s capabilities leave it ideally suited to contribute to an important open question called the mass hierarchy: we know neutrinos have three mass states, but not their order. Knowing the energies of neutrinos when they reach the INO, knowing where they were generated in the earth’s atmosphere and how far they’ve come, can help pin down the mass hierarchy of neutrinos. This has enormous implications for our understanding of how the universe is put together and the very framework in which physics is conducted. Other experiments being planned for the INO could throw light on dark matter, which makes up a quarter of the universe and is unaccounted for. Or hint at why there is more matter than anti-matter in the universe.There’s also the expectation that collaboration on such a large scale between researchers and students across the country, and in turn their working with designers and manufacturers of equipment and software for this large, complex, indigenous project will prove invigorating to science, tech and industry.The INO has faced resistance in recent months. On January 21, the general secretary of the MDMK party, Vaiko, filed a PIL with the Madurai bench of the Madras High Court. He asked for the project’s execution to be stayed, citing a number of concerns. Some were routine for an undertaking of this type (and had been considered in planning the INO): underground water channels and dams in the area might be affected while blasting a tunnel. Others seemed far-fetched: the INO is a ploy of the United States to get India to share data that will be used to develop some sort of weapon; the cavern might be used to store dangerous nuclear waste; man-made neutrino beams from faraway labs directed at the INO could cause earthquakes or make streams radioactive. These points originated, verbatim in many cases, in articles opposing the INO written in the last few years by an activist named VT Padmanabhan. All the concerns, some apparently existing only in the realm of science fiction — it’s hard to find any reference to “neutrino weapons” outside the Artemis Fowl novels — have been addressed by independent geological experts as well as by INO scientists on their website and in the press.In February, the anti-nuclear-energy activist, SP Udayakumar called the INO “a commercial venture taken up to benefit a US laboratory involved in nuclear studies” while also claiming “the INO site is going to become a nuclear waste dump yard.” The Department of Atomic Energy put out a press release on February 20 stating categorically that “no nuclear waste will be stored there at any time”. At the beginning of March, activist Medha Patkar campaigned against the INO with Vaiko, speculating, among other things, that the INO may be “used as a nuclear fuel processing plant“ and that “even the scientists involved in the project may not know what will happen in the observatory”.A news report quoted locals as saying they were initially in favour of the project because they thought they would be helping in the nation’s development. But they were now opposed to it and grateful to Vaiko for opening their eyes. “Last time, when he came here,” a man named Periyannan was quoted as saying, “he explained to us how our lands would be destroyed and even grass wouldn’t grow on our lands once the project begins.” Women in the area now believe they will have trouble conceiving if the project takes off.On March 26, the court asked the centre not to proceed with work on the INO until it received clearance from the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board. This was a condition prominently stated in the Ministry of Environment and Forests’ clearance of 2011, and was a pending requirement. Work had begun on the access road to the site, not at the site itself, and this too was stopped.It’s on March 28 that I find myself going to Pudukottai. I ask a couple of people in nearby settlements for directions, and also what people in the area think of the INO. They confirm that most people have misgivings about it now. I ask the first person I meet in Pudukottai, a farmer named Ponnpandi, whether he’s for or against the INO project. Against. He’s worried about dust from the underground construction two kilometres away, about something going wrong with his produce. Two men ride up on a scooter within five minutes of my having arrived. They introduce themselves as Maran and Sathya, anti-INO activists from the Proletarian Liberation Front. They offer to show me around the site. One of them has a handycam — he’s making a documentary against the project. Earlier that morning, they tell me, a group of people from the villages around was to visit a shrine near (but outside) the INO site to offer thanks for the court’s decision, but large numbers of police materialised and stopped them. How did the police find out? “Informants.” Maran, the older of the two men, says the informants are people in the area aligned with the ruling AIADMK. He moves his fingers briskly across his thumb indicating that money is involved. Are my present companions then aligned with the MDMK? For this protest, yes. There’s a level of intrigue here that I didn’t expect.They too are making and receiving calls at intervals, telling people at the other end that they’re showing someone from Mumbai Mirror around. Over the course of the next hour, familiar claims about the project are repeated, with a couple more thrown in. (For instance: there may be valuable minerals in the Charnockite rock and corporates might want to mine them. Like who? Maybe Adani.) I’ve heard talk about how the state assembly elections in 2016 may be causing political parties to go into overdrive, and so I ask who he thinks might win next year. He shrugs. “Everyone is corrupt. Whoever pays the most money gets elected.”In the evening I receive a phone call from Norway. (I’d left my card with the activists.) It’s an Indian student at a university there, offering me technical documents that show the disingenuousness of the INO scientists. He emails me a set of slides and research papers with the revelatory bits highlighted. Routine collaborations and old institutional affiliations of INO scientists are in yellow as if they’re proof of some sort of collusion. The fact that neutrino experiments between pairs of labs have even been considered by some of the INO scientists in the last 15 years is flagged as suspicious. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing nefarious here.Clearly, the protest is well-organised — that call from Norway, the pamphlets I’ve been handed for that morning’s thwarted thanksgiving. And I sense there are wheels within wheels here with political parties becoming involved. The activists I met were earnest and passionate — and entirely sceptical of the union government and INO researchers. To them the INO is a US- and corporate-led conspiracy that will ruin the land, water and lives of Tamil people. The researchers can argue, with good reason, that the observatory houses a passive telescope-like device; that similar labs are functioning across the world without catastrophe. But no reassurance is likely to work. “Scientists are very good at fooling people,” Maran explains.The INO needs the state pollution board’s clearance before it can proceed. The director of the project, Prof Naba Mondal of TIFR, says they weren’t expecting any trouble with the clearance. But with political parties becoming involved in protests, they are now more apprehensive. In all, across institutions, about a hundred students and faculty are presently working on the INO. Dr D Indumathi, of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, which is part of the collaboration says, “Students are still working with smaller prototypes or using simulated data. If the delays continue, they may not be able to work on the kind of challenging problems we envisaged.” The INO was conceived in 2000 and work is yet to start in earnest. “If the project is delayed any further,” Prof Mondal says, “it will be disastrous. Its competitiveness will be lost.” And along with it, years of preparatory work by students and scientists, and also perhaps the enthusiasm to attempt large science projects.The day before I went to Pudukottai, I attended a public lecture on neutrinos delivered by Prof Mondal in Madurai. At the end of the talk, a small group of activists rushed him at the front of the room, television cameras appearing at their side with surprising rapidity. He invited them to sit down and have a discussion. The by-now-standard criticisms of the project were trotted out with some anger. Tamil pride was invoked against the INO’s supposed violation of the land and its people. A physics student attending the talk heatedly told the activists that he was Tamil too and didn’t see anything wrong with the project. The professor’s responses were mostly lost to the protesters’ rage. At one point, he asked, exasperated, “Do you really believe that scientists from 22 institutions will come together and conspire against the country?” For all the effect his words had, they might as well have been neutrinos.