First IIT in country to be made a full member
IIT Madras' admission was made possible by a presentation made to CMS' collaboration board by Prof Prafulla Kumar Behera, associate professor of Physics, IIT Madras
Chennai: The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras has added yet another feather to its cap. IIT Madras has become the first IIT to be made a full member of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) collaboration of CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire), the European organisation for nuclear research, where physicists and engineers continue to probe the fundamental structure of the universe.
CERN is well known for the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 and the world-wide-web (www) took its birth at CERN. The two experiments that discovered Higgs boson are A Toroidal LHC Apparatus (ATLAS) and CMS, which is a general-purpose detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).IIT Madras’ admission as a full member of CMS was made possible by a presentation made to the CMS’s collaboration board by Prof. Prafulla Kumar Behera, associate professor of Physics at IIT Madras. In his presentation, Prof. Behera emphasised the capabilities of IIT Madras in experimental research, particularly in high-energy physics.
In addition to Prof. Behera, a second faculty member involved in this work is Prof. James Libby. Two graduate students have already joined the group to work on the CMS experiment. Although India has been part of the CMS experiment since its inception, IIT Madras is the only IIT invited to join the CMS experiment as a full member. Prof. Bhaskar Ramamurthi, director, sees this as a tremendous opportunity for IIT Madras not only in the area of Physics, but also in a large number of related technologies, which are initiated and applied at CERN.
“We are excited by this development, and by the opportunities for direct participation in research in fundamental Physics, related technologies and developments in grid computing,” he said.Prof. Behera stated that this membership would enable IIT-M to contribute to frontier research in fundamental science, and reinforce our commitment towards research in basic sciences. The large data set produced in this experiment is processed through grid computing centres located all over the world.
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