Nov. 30: The department of physics, Gauhati University, has joined the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR), a multi-million Euro international collaboration on high energy nuclear physics research.
“The 12th FAIR-CBM (Compressed Baryonic Matter) international collaboration meeting held at Dubna, Russia, last month recognised Gauhati University as one of its member institutes. This is for the first time that the physics department of the university is participating in an international collaborative research of this magnitude. It is a really encouraging peace of news which the department received a few days ago,” said Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, the principal collaborator of the GU group and a reader of the physics department.
Altogether 14 countries, including Austria, China, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, India, Italy, Poland, Romania, Russia, Spain, Sweden and the UK, have signed the memorandum of understanding for FAIR, indicating their intention to participate in the project.
The European Union, Hungary and the US have observer status in the project.
“The experiment aims at providing answers to a number of fundamental queries about nature such as, what are the basic components of matter? What keeps them together? How did the universe begin? And how has the universe developed up to the present day? All these questions are of great scientific interest that may completely change our knowledge about nature. It will be immensely helpful for an institution like GU to conduct its own research on high energy nuclear physics,” Bhattacharjee said.
A senior teacher expressed happiness over the recognition and said GU would now be on a par with leading institutes like Jammu University, Rajasthan University, Banaras Hindu University, Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Calcutta, Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre (VECC), Calcutta, Aligarh Muslim University, Punjab University, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Mumbai, IIT Kharagpur, Calcutta University, Institute of Physics, Bhubaneswar, which are members of FAIR.
