God Particle's known Indian connection & beyond

BANGALORE, INDIA: Many Indians and lately, the West Bengal government, have woken up to the fact that the 'Boson' in Higgs Boson was named after the eminent Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose.

A sub-atomic particle, Boson, constitutes the now-famous God Particle, in common terminology. Meanwhile, in a classic case of late realization, the West Bengal Assembly accepted a proposal on Wednesday to name a road in Kolkata after Bose, who collaborated with the legendary Albert Einstein in the 1920s on particle physics experiments.

Along with European Organization for Nuclear Research — more discernible as CERN — almost 100 scientists of Indian origin and/or upbringing from the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics (SINP), Kolkata, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, Harishchandra Research Institute, Allahabad and Institute of Physics, Bhubaneswar, were also involved for years in the path-breaking experiment that might indelibly impact particle physics as the world has known it yet.

After the CERN scientists corroborated that there really is a sub-atomic particle 'consistent' with the Higgs Boson through the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment in Geneva, Paolo Giubellino, spokesperson of CERN declared, "India is like a historic father of the project."

Prior to this ambitious experiment, several scientists from SINP were already involved in the development of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiments at CERN. As a nation and scientific community, India has also provided some key equipment and systems for building the LHC. It includes superconducting magnets, engineering components for electronics and control systems, precision magnet positioning system jacks for holding the atom smasher and other engineering and testing equipment.

Earlier, CERN had invited India to be participating members in two LHC experiments, named CMS and ALICE. CMS was for searching the Higgs particle and ALICE for an esoteric primordial soup called Quark-Gluon Plasma.