India has developed critical high-tech equipment for the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR), one of the world’s largest international research facilities under construction in Darmstadt, Germany.
As a founding member of the project, India has designated Bose Institute in Kolkata as the nodal institution coordinating the country’s participation in FAIR.
Indian engineers are actively involved in designing, manufacturing and supplying in-kind accelerator items including power converters, vacuum chambers, beam catchers and IT diagnostic cables.
The high-tech power converters, advanced cryogenic feedback loops and next-generation muon detectors, designed and built in India, will play a crucial role for FAIR.
The first of three units of beam catcher equipment, an integral part of the beam line (the path leading from particle generator to the experimental end-station) has reached the International Mega Science Project, Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) site and waiting for its installation.
These are one of the key elements of the super fragment separator (super-FRS) that produces the radioactive beams.
The equipment is required to absorb the remnants from the primary heavy-ion beams of energy 0.4-1.5 GeV/nucleon when it hits to production target for production of radioactive beams.
A typical order of 5×1011 particles/spill deposit ~ 29kJ energy in the absorbing medium (graphite) within a pulse of 50-100 ns at a time interval of 1.67s. The localized energy deposition density in the absorber (Bragg peak) causes the peak energy density to be as high as 300 J/g per pulse.
This is expected to induce thermal shock waves in the absorbers and is one of the major challenges in design of beam catchers.
The beam catcher was designed by the Central Mechanical Engineering Research Institute (CSIR-CMERI) in Durgapur under the supervision of Bose Institute, the primary coordinator for Indian institutional and scientific participation in FAIR.
The FAIR facility will be the biggest radioactive beam accelerator in the world, recreating extreme conditions by bombarding samples of matter with particles.
Civil construction work, which initiated in 2017, is now almost complete, with the main tunnel finished along with the experimental cave of CBM and the high energy cave of NUSTAR.
The first beam from the accelerator for users is expected by 2027.
Indian researchers have been participating in two major experiments at FAIR: Nuclear Structure, Astrophysics and Reactions (NUSTAR) and Compressed Baryonic Matter (CBM), with Bose Institute particularly involved in the CBM experiment to study matter created in relativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions.
The member states in FAIR are Germany, Finland, France, India, Poland, Romania, Russia, Sweden and Slovenia, with the United Kingdom and Czech Republic as associate members.
The Department of Science and Technology and the Department of Atomic Energy have jointly promoted India’s participation in this mega science project.
As part of India’s in-kind contributions, the country has to supply sophisticated components which include power converters, ultra-high vacuum chambers, beam stoppers, superconducting magnets and advanced detector systems.
This participation offers significant commercial potential, forming the base to involve Indian industry for product development initiatives across sectors from medical and healthcare to nuclear power and homeland security.
