An ambitious plan to make India a hub of experimental physics may open up a world of opportunities for budding scientists and engineers to probe the mysteries of the universe.

The detection of gravitational waves - an invisible (yet incredibly fast) ripple in space - in September 2015 was widely hailed as the most important scientific breakthrough of the century. It was made using the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), a large-scale physics experiment to detect cosmic gravitational waves.

More than 1,000 scientists from all over the world are involved in the LIGO project, including many in India who played a seminal role. LIGO has observatories in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana in the US. The proposed LIGO-India project aims to move one Advanced LIGO detector from Hanford to India.

An important agreement signed last week will enable Indian scientists to work with UK institutes for extended periods of time, with reciprocal visits to Indian labs to develop infrastructure and provide onsite training, essential for a LIGO-India detector that is expected to be operational by 2024.

"It will give Indians a chance to participate in a new field of cutting-edge research," says Somak Raychaudhury, director, Inter-University, Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (Iucaa), Pune, which is involved in building LIGO-India. "To build the project we'll need people not just skilled in theoretical physics, but geology, material science and engineering," he adds.

Incidentally, the 2017 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to professors Kip Thorne, Barry Barish and Rainer Weiss "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves".