Anshuman Swain shows his innovation. Telegraph picture

Bhubaneswar, Dec. 22: Fifteen-year-old Anshuman Swain has come up an innovation that holds the promise of revealing details about the creation of the universe. The project — Devatron: God’s own machine — aims to respond to global energy crisis. According to him, it would also help man travel in time.

Hailing from the small town Talcher in Angul district, Anshuman, a Class X student of DAV Public School, was always keen to understand the fundamental nature of the universe. Today, this inquisitiveness has led him to earn for himself a spot in the World Top 20 at the International Modern Physics Project Presentation for Youth — 2010 conducted by the International Association of Physics Students (IAPS). To develop his project to perfection, the IAPS has presented him with research tools worth 5 million US dollars.

However, this is not the first time he has made news. Anshuman, a member of the junior scientist club at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), hogged the limelight last month when he was adjudged ‘Best Child Scientist’, both at the district and state levels, in the National Children Science Congress. He is also an application developer for Google, Yahoo, as well as a games developer for UB Soft and EA Sports.

Born to Ranjan Kumar, a professor at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Technology, Saranga, and Jayashree, a housewife, Anshuman wishes to become an astrophysicist and win the Nobel Prize someday.

Talking about his award-winning project, which is modelled after the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, Devatron is a “linear laser wakefield particle accelerator”. Anshuman derived ideas for his project from the works of astrophysicist Michio Kaku’s Physics of the Impossible and Nobel laureate Yoichiro Nambu.

“In simple terms, it can be used to collide nuclear particles at very high speeds to create matter to meet our energy requirements. Unlike the LHC that involved billions of dollars and spans over 27kms, my model is low-cost, very small and requires less manpower to produce huge amounts of energy. One can even travel in time by extracting negative energy out of it,” said Anshuman.

“However, the main application of the project is generating anti-matter, which rarely exists,” he added. He explained when the universe was created owing to a massive explosion called Big Bang, matter and anti-matter were created in equal amounts. “Anti-matter, however, can now hardly be traced in our galaxy,” he said.

At present, he is working on strengthening the theoretical aspects of his project. “I am also trying to contact scientists at the Institute of Physics to develop this project. If given a chance I would love to make a presentation before the chief minister and governor,” he said.