INDIAN physicists are going underground. Their government has given the green light and $235 million funding to build the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO), the country's 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's 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's atmosphere. Placing INO in a cave protects it from being swamped with noise from other particles, because these can't pass through rock as easily as neutrinos.
INO's position near the equator will also allow it to see neutrinos that originate in the sun and pass through Earth's core. This may help physicists learn why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe.
This article appeared in print under the headline "Indian neutrinos"
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