The India connection does not stop at Bose

Scientists from all over the country were at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics in Kolkata on Wednesday, watching a live telecast from Geneva and cheering Indians' contribution to the discovery of a particle consistent with the fabled Higgs boson.

There was cheer also in Mumbai's Tata Institute Fundamental Research. Saranya Ghosh, 23, and Rajdeep M Chatterjee, 24, PhD students at TIFR, were back from CERN in Geneva only days ago and rejoiced in the "proud moment for us all".

Apart from SINP and TIFR, scientists from Harishchandra Research Institute in Allahabad and Institute of Physics in Bhubaneswar too were involved in the project.

SINP scientists were involved in the Compact Meone Solinude experiment, one of two — the other is called Atlas — conducted in the hunt for the particle. TIFR leads the CMS experiment; SNIP director Milan K Sanyal said it involves 4,000 scientists from over 30 countries. And five of them were from SINP, working on it for more than a decade."

"We think we have discovered the particle we have been looking for," Sanyal said. "Data collection is on... but we must say we have discovered something unknown." SINP's Suchandra Bhattacharya, who was involved in the hunt, said, "It gives me immense pleasure to know that we have finally achieved our target." And TIFR professor Monoranjan Guchait said, "Our intuition is that it is the Higgs boson particle."

One thing that bothers Sanyal, however, is the way the scientific world, including the authorities at CERN, have punctuated the name of the particle. "Higgs boson" is spelt with an uppercase H for Higgs — after Peter Higgs — but a lowercase b for boson, named after S N Bose. Ideally boson too should have been written with a capital B, said Sanyal, who will email his view to CERN.

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