God particle's Delhi-connect

While the world was celebrating the discovery of a new subatomic particle, professors at Delhi University's Physics and Astrophysics Department were having a small celebration of their own.

While the world was celebrating the discovery of a new subatomic particle, professors at Delhi University's Physics and Astrophysics Department were having a small celebration of their own.

The team that helped make the discovery of this Higgs boson like particle possible had on board five faculty members and eight PhD students - all from Delhi University.

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The equipment being used to measure the energy of the Gammas from atomic particles has been prefabricated in India.

"More than 1000 Silicon based Pre-Shower Detectors were made in India and are taking data at CERN. The detectors are being operated and maintained by an Indian team," said RK Shivpuri of the Department of Physics and Astrophysics who is also the Principal Investigator of the research project 'Study of new particles with the CMS detector at the Large Hadron Collider and Heavy Ion Physics using LHC at CERN - CMS experiment.

Before starting on this project, the Indian team performed research and development of the detector.

Apart from Shivpuri, other professors involved in the project are Kirti Ranjan, Ashok Kumar, Ashutosh Bhardwaj and Md. Maimuddin

According to Shivpuri, the DU group also contributes in a significant manner to the software development of the experiment.

"Since billions of interactions are produces in a day, the amount of data is huge and in order to make sense of this data, the software effort needed is enormous. DU students and faculty are involved in this gigantic effort. DU is also a Tier 3 grid computing facility and we have access to the computing facility at CERN, Geneva," he said.

Three DU students will write their PhD thesis on Higgs search.

The significance of the particle is that it helps scientists understand the universe and how things work together. It explains how particles acquire mass.