Comments from New Scientist Magazine on INO

Indian neutrino lab to boast world's biggest magnet
by Anil Ananthaswamy

A major neutrino observatory set to be built in India cleared a major hurdle this week, when the Ministry of Environment and Forests formally approved the project.

The $250 million underground laboratory, called the Indian Neutrino Observatory (INO), will be built in the Bodi West Hills Reserved Forest in the state of Tamil Nadu.

The hills there rise very steeply, so workers will have to tunnel only about 2 kilometres horizontally to provide the laboratory with about 1300 metres of high-quality granite cover above. The rock cover is needed to shield the neutrino detector from particles called muons that form when cosmic rays hit the atmosphere.

INO will be made of 50,000 tonnes of magnetised iron, dwarfing the 12,500-tonne magnet in the Compact Muon Solenoid detector at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. "It'll be the most massive magnet [ever built]," says team member M. V. N. Murthy of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai, Tamil Nadu.
Anti-neutrinos too

Neutrinos will interact with the iron – which will be layered in sheets – and spew out charged particles, whose paths will be bent by the iron's magnetic field. About 30,000 detectors sandwiched between the sheets of iron will track these charged particles, providing information about the incident neutrinos.

INO will initially study atmospheric neutrinos, which are produced when cosmic rays smash into the upper atmosphere.

Unlike most neutrino detectors, such as the Super-Kamiokande in Japan or the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Canada, INO will be sensitive to both neutrinos and anti-neutrinos, which interact with matter in different ways.

Neutrinos and their antimatter counterparts oscillate between three types: electron, tau and muon. INO should help physicists understand which of the three types is the lightest and which is the heaviest.


http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19620-indian-neutrino-lab-to-boast-worlds-biggest-magnet.html