Pakistan’s contribution to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)

[Materialistic]

Pakistan’s contribution to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)


Large Hadron Collider (LHC - not to be confused with Lahore High Court in anyway) is a Physicist’s dream come true. Being world’s biggest science apparatus ever built this is a show of science on how far have we come to in our mental and analytical evolution. Today with the LHC we are at brink of understanding the existence of ours from the very basic ground up. This time we are not even looking at the DNA, neither we are exploring the fossils, we have even gone beyond all that. We are today finding how the Big Bang happened. And there especially to know about that first particle (infamously called, the God Particle) known as Higgs boson.

This LHC spans over a near circular circumference of 27 KM underground setup spanning over the Swiss-Franco border, with support from thousands of Physicists, scientists and laboratories from over eighty-five countries. It is housed in the same tunnels which were dug in 1989 for Large Electron-Positron Collider, with of course some new specialized construction. With an estimated cost between €3.2–6.4 billion, this machine successfully fired itself up on 10th Septemeber 2008, whereas the full high intensity firing will be done by 21st October. Yet already it has made sensational news world wide.

With reports of people filing a petition against it, to an Indian 16 year old girl who committed suicide as she thought once LHC is fired it will bring end of the world (refer to as Doomsday), to continuous circulating emails and forum postings calling relating it with playing God, to finally sending death threats to some of the leading involved scientists. World has gone paranoid it seems to the frenzy the LHC’s elaborate marketing has caused. Doomsday prophets have suddenly popped out everywhere. Just only tragedy would be that majority of them don’t even know what are they talking about!

In order to help explain the whole process to the common people, perhaps even those who have gone paranoid, a scientist working at the CERN has even released her own rap! Honestly, if you follow it carefully it explains it way better than most of the texts you will find about it online.

Pakistan's Contribution

Coming back from a brief introduction to the LHC, lets talk about the contribution of Pakistan it. Its a matter of pride for me at least at the moment as a Pakistani is that LHC has been assisted in this by Pakistani wonderful scientists too. Pakistan has a long history of participating with CERN and has a long tradition of wonderful physicists who are working around the world. A prime example would be Dr Abdul Salam himself who sadly was forgotten by Pakistan just because of his religious preferences. Dr Salam was the first man to be accredited with all the collaboration with CERN which continues till todate when he convinced CERN to give Pakistan stacks of nuclear emulsion exposed for further study of pions, kaons and antiprotons in 1960s.

In 1997 Ishfaq Ahmad (special adviser to the prime minister of Pakistan and former chairman of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission) was able to sign a contract between PAEC and CERN after elaborate discussions an in-kind contribution worth one million Swiss francs for the construction of eight magnet supports for the CMS detector.

In 2000, CERN signed another agreement which doubled the Pakistani contribution from one to two million Swiss francs. And with this new agreement Pakistan started construction of the resistive plate chambers required for the CMS muon system. While more recently, a protocol has been signed enhancing Pakistan’s total contribution to the LHC programme to $10 million.

Pakistan with all these efforts is already hoping to become an observer state at CERN.

All in all, Pakistan has contributed the LHC in numerous ways including some of the following in particular:

- Detector construction
- Detector simulation
- Physics analysis
- Grid computing
- Different mathematical software developments
- Manufacturing of mechanical equipment
- Alignment of the CMS tracker using lasers
- Testing of electronic equipment
- Barrel Yoke: 35 Tonn each feet made in Pakistan
- Assembling of CF Fins for the Silicon Trekker’s TOB
- Out of the total 300 chambers of CMS 245 were made in Islamabad, out of which 226 are already installed at CERN

I wonder how many Pakistani news channels picked this positive news coming from Pakistan? Did you know at least? Why not tell others why you feel proud as a Pakistani on it?

Also, there is route Mentioned after the name of Dr. Abdus Salam in an honor to his work and contribution to science specifically physics.

http://****.in/wtf/?p=132

Some more references
CERN and Pakistan: a personal perspective - CERN Courier
Pakistani physics - CERN Courier
Pakistani(s) Contributions in Large Hadron Collider Experiment Haroon Saeed’s Weblog..