Institute Distinctiveness: Heritage and Research
Panjab University was reborn in the independent India but having the same DNA of achieving the highest scientific and research goals. The legacy, over the years, was kept intact both in terms of contributing to the scientific endeavors, imbibing the same temperament leading to many world level rankings in the field of research.
A Brief Historical Overview
The department of physics, which is one of the oldest departments in the university, has a long history of many firsts and producing legendary leaders and scientists. One of the biggest citations contributor to the Panjab University’s overall research index is the Experimental High Energy Group. This group was mentored by many globally known stalwarts of that era.
The group was established initially as the Cosmic Ray group and was one of the leading groups in India along with the TIFR, Mumbai. This group, after acquiring the expertise in the other modes of studies of sub-atomic world, further evolved into fixed target, colliding beams, heavy ions groups. The major achievement of these new groups was, which is continuing till date, to establish contact with the international collaborations in Russia (erstwhile USSR) – JINR; Switzerland – CERN in experiments UA1, UA2, LEP I, LEP II, WA98, NA49, World Lab program; Fermilab (USA), BNL (USA); KEK (Japan); DESY (Germany). These collaborative efforts, which required the participating Panjab University group to contribute at par with other collaborators and perform tasks and deliver the outputs, are still going on with the full support of the Government of India funding agencies like, DST and DAE for last many decades.
The new line of collaborations established, in fact built on the solid base of the above mentioned earlier efforts, have given the Panjab University groups international exposure and stature of one of its kind. Projects worth more than Rs. 30 Cr in the last twenty years tells the confidence of the scientific community of the country and the funding agencies in participating and representing India in these multi-national big experimental collaborations, namely: DZERO, STAR, ALICE, CMS, BELLE, ZEUS
Big Breakthroughs and Ongoing Experiments
DZERO experiment at Fermilab – PU group contributed to The Discovery of the Top Quark (one of missing pieces of the Standard Model of Particle Physics)
CMS Experiment at CERN – Experimental Verification of existence of the Higgs Boson particle (particle responsible in giving masses to different particles in sub-atomic world)
STAR and ALICE Experiment – Discovery of Anti-Alpha particles, Signatures of the Quark-Gluon-Plasma – the primordial soup of particles which were present at the earliest times just after the Big Bang
BELLE at KEK (Japan) – Search for CP-Violation in the Bottom Quark sector: This may hold a partial key to the Baryonic nature of our visible Universe
NOvA at Fermilab – Neutrino Oscillation experiment for understanding the nature of neutrinos and anti-neutrinos (the second most abundant particle in the visible Universe)
Academic Contributions
These international collaborative efforts have contributed to the Human Resource Development of one of its kind and that to in the University system. The intellectual growth of the contributors is enormous and the local research laboratories have achieved the international standards. For example, the establishment of a Remote Operations Center (ROC) for the Fermilab (USA) based NOvA experiment which can be used to monitor/control the experimental detectors in the USA and take scientific data for neutrino studies, establishing a detector fabrication facility approved by the CERN team as being at par with any other such facility available globally.
The top ranking of university in the academic citations index comes from the Experimental High Energy Physics (EHEP) group in a big way, and the top few positions in the country, in terms of these indices, are held by the members of the EHEP group in the Panjab University. These collaborations bring in the latest cutting edge technologies to India, either by training manpower on them abroad or by the Transfer-of-Technology (ToT) mode.
Summary
These endeavors, like the above mentioned experiments, continue for decades and the expertise built up in the system brings in the confidence to go for bigger challenges in the field of detector developments, new materials, fast electronics, physics analyses, computing techniques for big data handling, distributive and high performance computing, Artificial Intelligence tools for data analysis. The offshoots of such experimental activities are in large numbers, just to mention one prominent in terms of societal benefit is the Medical Imaging techniques and cheaper Scanning Detectors for medical diagnostics and treatments. Thus one can say that the contribution of such a field of physics has tremendous potential and the funding support, in keeping the collaborations going on, for the future – proposed experiments helps in reaping big!