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13.1.11

Large number of questions greet expert working on large hadron collider

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has always been a point of curiosity, given its reputation as the biggest experiment in the history of mankind, worth a staggering 3.6 billion euro. The students of Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology were fortunate enough on Wednesday to interact with physicist AK Mohanty from Mumbai, who has worked at the LHC in Geneva and seen it in action. The event was organized by VNIT's 'Love for Physics' club.

The LHC has been built at the European Institute of Nuclear Research or more popularly CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. Mohanty explained that the experiment wants to answer questions like how was the universe created. "The universe just didn't come out of nowhere. It has to have a beginning. What CERN is trying to re-create is the big bang that resulted in the Universe as we know it. We are trying to create a mini-universe in that laboratory," he said.

Mohanty has gone to Geneva on behalf of the Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC), Mumbai. He informed that 10,000 scientists from 100 countries have dedicated themselves to finding an answer to basic questions that have troubled generations. "The LHC is basically a 27-km long tunnel, in which two particles are accelerated at the speed of light in opposite directions. When they reach the necessary speeds, they are allowed to collide. This results in the creation of matter. The countries that have been involved in this huge experiment have worked 20 years to accomplish this task."

There have been a lot of controversies surrounding the LHC, and Mohanty tried to clear the air on some of them. "People often ask what is there to be achieved by spending so much money to collide two microscopic particles. I believe that today's basic research is tomorrow's technology. Scientists at CERN are making discoveries on a day-to-day basis due to the LHC. Protons and antiproton beams used for cancer therapy have their origins at the LHC. Due to the LHC, scientists have been able to understand the structure of the nucleus better. The Positron Emission Tomography or PET scan is a result of continuous research going on at CERN. It has proved to be a boon for mankind," he said.

"The LHC is facing many challenges but there is still a long way to go," said Mohanty. "The particle needs to be accelerated to the speed of light, which requires a lot of energy. Supplying this energy has proved to be a very difficult task for scientists at CERN. Not only that, the experiment has to be conducted in a state of complete vacuum. Imagine creating such an environment in a 27-km-long pipeline. The data that we get after one single run is huge. After the collision, a million particles are created for a fraction of a second. They need to be studied after the data is collected before we can look for any results."

Mohanty faced a lot of questions from the curious crowd of students. When asked about the current status of the experiment, Mohanty said, "At present, we have been able to collide heavy nucleus. I have seen the results along with other scientists and they have been quite successful."
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