umbai : Scientists from the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) have played a significant role in designing and developing the world's newest and biggest particle detector for studying nuclear physics which was commissioned recently at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in the US.

This detector has been installed at the "Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider," which has been built at a cost of $ 600 million, a press release issued by the BARC on Wednesday has stated. According to the press release, the BARC team contributed to the PHENIX (pioneering high energy nuclear interaction experiment) detector which forms a part of the collider experiment.

The press release said the BARC team made contributions in the field of computer software for detector design and physics simulation while setting up PHENIX. "By way of hardware supply also, the BARC contributed very high precision detector equipment fabricated at its central workshops," it stated.

"The professionalism of the BARC contribution to this construction is remarkable and welcome," said PHENIX spokesperson Bill Zaic in a message to the leader of the Indian team S.S.Kapoor, the BARC's director of physics and electronics and instrumentation group.

According to the press release, scientists at the Brookhaven National Laboratory have now begun detecting head-on collisions between "gold nuclei" moving at nearly the speed of light in the collider machine. By smashing together sufficiently dense bunches of nuclei of elements like gold with extremely high energies, an interaction energy as large as 30-40 Te V (Terra Electron Volt) is reached. For a fraction of a second, this will result in a temperature which will be one hundred thousand times hotter than the core of the sun, the press release stated.

The scientists believe that under such conditions it will recreate the early seconds of the Big Bang. Added the press release: "These detectors have been designed and built by scientific collaborations involving a large number of universities and research institutions not only in the US but worldwide, a nice example of demonstrating that science has no borders ."