Science & Technology Quiz: Mega Science Projects: ITER, CERN, LIGO-India and the Neutrino Observatory

The correct answer is C, 27 km. The Large Hadron Collider occupies a circular tunnel about 27 kilometres around, lying roughly 100 metres below the ground on the Swiss-French border near Geneva, and it is the largest and most powerful particle accelerator ever built; the tunnel was originally dug for an earlier CERN machine, the Large Electron-Positron collider. Option A, 7 km, is far too small and is nearer the size of a medium accelerator ring. Option B, 17 km, is a popular distractor because the number is close, and candidates who remember only that the figure is in the twenties often pick it. Option D, 47 km, is larger than the LHC and is the kind of figure discussed for proposed future colliders, not for the existing machine. Remember the pair 27 km and 100 m deep, and that the protons inside are steered by superconducting magnets cooled with liquid helium.

The correct answer is A, Geneva. The European Organization for Nuclear Research, founded in 1954, has its campus at Meyrin on the outskirts of Geneva in Switzerland, and because its tunnels run under the border, parts of the laboratory lie in France as well. Option B, Vienna, is the seat of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is a very different body dealing with nuclear safety and safeguards. Option C, Darmstadt in Germany, is the home of the GSI laboratory and of FAIR, the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research, in which India is a partner, so it belongs to the same family of questions but not to CERN. Option D, Grenoble in France, hosts the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility and the Institut Laue-Langevin. A quick memory link is CERN, Geneva, 1954 and the 27-kilometre ring.

The correct answer is B, ATLAS and CMS. These are the two general purpose detectors on the LHC ring, and in July 2012 both independently reported a new particle of about 125 giga-electronvolts that matched the Higgs boson, the particle linked to the field that gives mass to other particles; the Nobel Prize in Physics of 2013 went to Peter Higgs and Francois Englert for the theory. Option A, ALICE and LHCb, are also LHC experiments, but ALICE studies the quark-gluon plasma in heavy-ion collisions and LHCb studies particles containing the bottom quark. Option C, Super-Kamiokande in Japan and SNO in Canada, are neutrino detectors whose work on neutrino oscillation won the Nobel Prize of 2015. Option D names the detector and the readout chambers planned for the India-based Neutrino Observatory, not anything at CERN. The word boson itself honours Satyendra Nath Bose.

The correct answer is C, France. ITER is coming up at Saint-Paul-les-Durance in the Cadarache area of southern France, and its seven partners are the European Union, China, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States; the name is the Latin word for the way. Option A, Japan, is a partner and hosts related fusion work under a broader approach agreement with Europe, including the JT-60SA tokamak, which is why it is a tempting answer, but the ITER machine itself is in France. Option B, Germany, runs the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator at Greifswald, a different kind of magnetic confinement device. Option D, the United States, is a partner and earlier hosted major tokamaks such as TFTR, but not ITER. Fix in mind the chain ITER, tokamak, Cadarache in France, India in since 2005.

The correct answer is A, the Institute for Plasma Research at Gandhinagar. This institute of the Department of Atomic Energy is the national centre for plasma and fusion research, it houses the domestic agency ITER-India that supplies India share of the machine, and it operates India own tokamaks Aditya and SST-1, the Steady State Superconducting Tokamak. Option B, the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, is the premier centre for fission reactors, radioisotopes and the nuclear fuel cycle, not the ITER domestic agency. Option C, the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, works on telescopes and solar physics and is associated with projects such as the Thirty Meter Telescope. Option D, the Physical Research Laboratory, is the cradle of Indian space research and works on planetary and atmospheric sciences. The link to remember is plasma and fusion mean Gandhinagar.

The correct answer is A, thermal fusion. A hydrogen bomb, also called a thermonuclear bomb, uses a fission explosion only as a trigger; the main energy comes from the fusion of the heavy hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium into helium at temperatures of millions of degrees, which is why the process is described as thermonuclear or thermal fusion. The same reaction powers the Sun and is the reaction ITER is built to tame for peaceful energy. Option B, heavy water ability, is not a nuclear process at all; heavy water is a moderator and coolant used in Indian pressurised heavy water reactors. Option C, thermal fission, is the splitting of a heavy nucleus such as uranium-235 by slow neutrons and is the process of an atom bomb and of ordinary nuclear power stations. Option D, a breeder reaction, is fission that produces more fissile material than it consumes, as in a fast breeder reactor.

The correct answer is C. Fusion is the joining of two light nuclei into a heavier one, with a neutron or other products released and a large amount of energy appearing because the mass of the product is slightly less than the mass of the reactants; in ITER the reaction fuses deuterium and tritium into helium and a neutron. Option A is wrong because a light nucleus struck by thermal neutrons does not usefully break up; slow neutron induced splitting works on heavy fissile nuclei. Option B describes nuclear fission, the splitting of a heavy nucleus such as uranium-235 by thermal neutrons, which is the reverse of fusion. Option D describes spontaneous fission, in which a very heavy nucleus divides by itself without being struck, a form of radioactive decay. Fusion needs enormous temperature and pressure to overcome the electrical repulsion of the two nuclei, which is why a tokamak confines the plasma with magnetic fields.

The correct answer is B, Albert Einstein. Gravitational waves are ripples in space-time thrown out by violent events such as the merger of two black holes, and they follow from the general theory of relativity that Einstein published in 1915, with the prediction of the waves set out in 1916. LIGO recorded the first direct signal on 14 September 2015 and announced it in February 2016, and the Nobel Prize in Physics of 2017 went to Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne. Option A, Isaac Newton, gave the inverse square law of gravitation in which gravity acts instantly and no waves exist. Option C, Niels Bohr, worked on the atom and quantum theory. Option D, Stephen Hawking, is famous for black hole radiation and cosmology, which is why his name tempts candidates, but he was born well after the prediction was made.

The correct answer is A, Aundha in the Hingoli district of Maharashtra. The site was chosen for its flat, seismically quiet ground, the Union Cabinet approved the project in principle in 2016 and in full in April 2023, and it is being executed by the Department of Atomic Energy and the Department of Science and Technology with IPR, RRCAT Indore and IUCAA Pune. Option B, Hanle in Ladakh, is an astronomy site: it hosts the Indian Astronomical Observatory and the MACE gamma-ray telescope. Option C, Pottipuram in Theni district, is the planned site of the India-based Neutrino Observatory, a different mega science project. Option D, Khodad near Pune, is where the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope stands. Keep the pairs apart: gravitational waves at Hingoli, neutrinos at Theni, radio astronomy at Khodad and optical astronomy at Hanle.

The correct answer is B, a 50,000-tonne magnetised Iron CALorimeter, known as ICAL and read out by resistive plate chambers. Placed in a cavern under about 1,300 metres of rock at Pottipuram in the Bodi West Hills, it is designed to catch atmospheric neutrinos and measure how they change from one flavour to another, the phenomenon of neutrino oscillation; the magnetic field lets it tell a neutrino from an antineutrino. Option A, a water Cherenkov tank, is the design of Super-Kamiokande in Japan, not of ICAL. Option C, a liquid argon time projection chamber, is the technology of the American DUNE experiment. Option D, a superconducting tokamak, is a fusion machine such as India SST-1 and has nothing to do with neutrinos. The host institute of the observatory is the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, and India already recorded atmospheric neutrinos in the Kolar Gold Fields mines in 1965.