Edu-leaders

As many as ten Indian institutes namely - Aligarh Muslim University, University of Jammu, Institute of Physics in Bhubaneshwar, Punjab University, Universities of Guwahati and Rajasthan and Kolkata based Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre, Bose Institute and IIT, Mumbai have become a part of a historical event. Scientists of these institutions were involved in the discovery of Higgs Boson, commonly known as ‘God particle’.

Indian scientific and technological contributions were among the many that keep the world`s biggest particle physics laboratory buzzing at European Organisation for Nuclear Research, famously known as CERN. In a 'quantum' leap in physics, CERN scientists claimed to have spotted a sub-atomic particle 'consistent' with the Higgs boson or 'God particle', believed to be a crucial building block that led to the formation of the universe.

There is also an intrinsic Indian connection to what is happening at CERN. The Higgs Boson is a particle that is theoretically the reason why all matter in the Universe has mass. The name Higgs Boson came from a British scientist Peter Higgs and Indian scientist Satyendra Bose. It is Bose after whom the sub-atomic particle `boson` is named.

At the core of the CERN, spread over two countries as it is situated near the Swiss-Franco border, is the 27-km long tunnel, over 70 metres beneath the ground, where the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) or commonly referred to as the Big Bang experiment was conducted last year.