The rosewood and teak forest here in southern India's Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve is prime elephant habitat. It's also where Indian particle physicists hope to install a massive detector to stalk a more exotic quarry: neutrinos. But concerns about the well-being of the heaviest land animals have so far blocked plans to tune in to the lightest known fundamental particles. The $167 million India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO), slated for completion in 2012, is the country's most expensive science facility ever. The magnetized iron detector would be nestled in a cavern 2 kilometers deep inside a granite mountain in Tamil Nadu state, some 250 kilometers southeast of Bangalore. Neutrinos are produced in stars as well as on Earth, in nuclear reactors and when cosmic rays smash into the upper atmosphere. They have the slightest mass and are elusive because they interact with other particles only by means of the weak nuclear force. The granite in Nilgiri would absorb most cosmic rays that at the surface would swamp any neutrino signal, but neutrinos will readily pass through to the detector.
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