INDIAN physicists are going underground. Their government has given the green light and $235 million funding to build the , the country鈥檚 first underground laboratory to study the weakly interacting, nearly massless subatomic particles.
The experiment will place a 50,000-tonne magnetic detector in a cave 1300 metres beneath Ino Peak in southern India. This will be the world鈥檚 most massive magnet, outweighing the largest magnet at the Large Hadron Collider by a factor of four.
The idea is to detect neutrinos produced by interactions between cosmic rays and Earth鈥檚 atmosphere. Placing INO in a cave protects it from being swamped with noise from other particles, because these can鈥檛 pass through rock as easily as neutrinos.
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INO鈥檚 position near the equator will also allow it to see neutrinos that originate in the sun and pass through Earth鈥檚 core. This may help physicists learn why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe.
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淚ndian neutrinos鈥�
