Suchandra Dutta (extreme left) at the CMS experimental hall

Sept. 14: The international team of scientists involved with the Large Hadron Collider project at CERN near Geneva includes one from Malda who had to convince her mother that the experiment would not be the end of the world.

“What is this we are hearing? They say the world will come to an end and you are at the very centre of it all,” is what Mamata Dutta had reportedly told her daughter Suchandra, who is based in Pisa, over the phone.

“Why are you listening to all those rumours. There is no truth in them,” Suchandra had retorted, recalled her mother.

Today, when The Telegraph contacted Suchandra over the phone, the first thing she said was: “We are at the doorstep of one or more major discoveries that will benefit mankind and to be involved in it gives me a sense of pride and, of course, excitement.”

The scientist, whose hometown is Malda, did her doctorate from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research on large electron positron collider. In 1997, she started working on the development of the silicon detector of the CMS (compact muon solenoid), a component of the LHC project.

The CMS experiment, in which two beams of protons zipping in opposite directions at more than nine-tenths the speed of light will collide inside the tunnel, promises to revolutionise man’s understanding of the birth of the universe.

“The research and development work on the silicon detector started two years before I joined and it took seven years before we were convinced that it would work. We had to develop a silicon detector that would withstand for 10 to 15 years the radiation condition that would be produced when the protons collide. By 2003, the construction of the detector started,” Suchandra said.

She and her husband Subir Sarkar, also a physicist, are both based in the historic city, working with Italy’s National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), one of the major collaborators in the LHC project. But she is the one who has gone down to the 27km tunnel of the LHC.

“We were down there three of four times in August, before the proton beams were fired into the tunnel on September 10. The silicon detector was placed inside the tunnel on December 15 last year,” she said.

Suchandra once again dispelled the fears that the world would end when the protons collided to create a mini Big Bang. She said she was shocked to hear that a teenager in India, apparently fed on rumours that the experiment would spell doom, killed herself on September 9.

“The day the beam was let into the tunnel marked the culmination of the 20 years that it took to think about and start the epochal experiment. Everything went well and we were celebrating. Then the news came in that a girl in India had committed suicide because of the rumours and we were shocked and very sad,” Suchandra said.

“There is nothing to worry about. CERN is very concerned about the health of all those working on the project. They have been conducting regular blood tests and eye check-ups,” she added.

The husband and wife have heard that the tentative date for the protons to start colliding is October 21, by which time enough speed will be generated. “The impact is expected to produce 5 trillion electron volts per proton particle,” said Sarkar, who is now in Calcutta on a short visit.