Bhopal: Science doesn’t work in silos. War, geopolitical changes and politics can affect research and CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) – which has decision made Not renewing its cooperation with Russia after 2024 in solidarity with Ukraine – proof of that.
However, the organization continues to “work to keep science above politics,” according to Archana Sharma, principal scientist in the Physics Department at CERN and one of the 27 recipients This year’s Pravasi Bhartiya Samman Award. she was speaking During a media interaction at the 8th India International Science Festival (IISF) in Bhopal on Monday.
Apart from the effects of the war on science, Sharma also discussed a the upcoming Upgrade to CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and the opportunities it could bring for India’s scientists and industry.
“We will pause for a major upgrade for three years after 2025, which is a huge opportunity for scientists in India to participate not only in physics experiments but also in engineering, installation and commissioning,” he said.
“For future machines too, there is a lot of participation from India – from RRCAT, Variable Energy Cyclotron Center (VECC) in Kolkata, Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC) in Mumbai.”
Highlighting the past contributions of Indian scientists at CERN, Sharma said, “India has brilliant scientists in terms of theoretical physics. We have had people from TIFR (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai) attending CERN since the 1960s. Since the 1990s, there have been more coordinated efforts to make people part of experiments at CERN.
He also recalled how the Raja Ramanna Center for Advanced Technology (RRCAT), Indore had manufactured some components for CERN. He said the corrector magnets – which are used to correct the trajectory of the electron beam – were developed in Indore in 1996 with the help of industry.
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how the war affected science
In the context of the Ukraine-Russia war, Sharma said that for more than a year there has been a debate on how to acknowledge the work done by Russian scientists. “A lot of our work at CERN is done by scientists from Russia. Their work should not be neglected.” He said
“Although science should be above politics, there are people working in Ukraine as well. People who are working Ukraine has its own arguments, all European member states have their own arguments. We want to be neutral in order to keep science above politics.
The war also reduced the number of CERN publications, which featured researchers from many member countries. reluctant To share the authorship of scientific papers with their Russian counterparts.
“Number of publications (in CERN) went down during the war. Many publications are in preprint mode, waiting for the policy to be agreed upon,” Sharma said.
LHC and new project upgrade
Explaining why continuous work is needed to upgrade the LHC, Sharma said that although the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 was “one of a kind”. While the Standard Model of physics has been completed, there is still much left to understand about how the particle behaves, how it interacts with other particles, and whether there is more than one type of Higgs boson.
“Many questions remain unanswered, such as: Are there any candidates for dark matter?” Sharma said.
LHC has already collected 10 years of data on the Higgs boson, And scientists from different organizations are already working on it.
However, CERN will now upgrade the Large Hadron Collider; Later, it would be called the High Luminosity LHC. “It will collect 10 times more data than what was collected earlier,” Sharma said.
sharma works in building gas electron multiplier (GEM) detector at the LHC; He has built two such detectors in the last 10 years.
“We now only need to replicate with the other four stations. Those four stations are being built now as we speak and they should be ready in the coming years – from 2025 to 2026 – for the next part of the LHC will be set up sequentially. They have formed a team of very young physicists who are helping to build these stations, he said.
Besides this, Sharma is also working on making the experiments more eco-friendly.
Currently, older detectors have to be filled with gases containing Freon. Freons are chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) compounds containing only carbon, chlorine and fluorine, produced as volatile derivatives of methane, ethane and propane. CFCs are known to be ozone depleting.
“We are using detectors that have been running for decades. These detectors can fail, and in any case they are already becoming obsolete,” she said.
“Now, the GEM detector has already gotten rid of freons; This is one step towards making gas detectors greener. More research and development is underway to downsize existing detectors so they can be operated without freons.”
There are also ambitious plans to build a new, much larger collider – the Future Circular Collider (FCC) – with a radius of 100 kilometers in Geneva.
Sharma said the energy of collisions within this new collider will increase many times over – and so will the funding needs. Currently, feasibility studies for the project are underway.