Efforts are underway to find a suitable new location for the India-based Neutrino Observatory project. This new location is envisaged to host a deep underground experimental facility at a depth of 1.5-2 km. The facility would consist of multiple underground caverns where independent experiments may be carried out in a wide range of areas, including high energy physics, nuclear physics, astrophysics, geophysics, etc. Therefore, this may be the right time to expand the scope of such a facility, keeping in view the interests, aspirations and plans of the wider Indian scientific community for the next few decades.
In order to gauge the interest of Indian scientists in performing experiments at a deep underground experimental facility in India, an in-person meeting will be held in TIFR, Mumbai, on 6-7 August 2022.
The plan is to build a facility that will provide a suitable environment for underground experiments for many decades. Multiple experiments can be operational at the same time, and upon completion of an experiment, another experiment may replace it at the same location. Hence ideas for experiments with short or long term duration, with the planned time of starting distributed over the next few decades, are welcome.
Some of the proposed experiments, e.g. the study of atmospheric neutrinos (ICAL@INO, https://www.ino.tifr.res.in/ino/), the search for dark matter (DINO, http://www.saha.ac.in/web/about-dino ), and the search for neutrinoless double beta decay (TinTin, https://www.tifr.res.in/~tin.tin/), already have made some progress towards their goal. The future plans of these projects will also be presented in this meeting. If you are interested to start participating in any of these experiments, or have ideas that could be close to / relevant for these experiments, you are encouraged to contact these experiments directly.
A consolidated report of this meeting would be forwarded to the government agencies for further action. It would help make a case for the desirability of a multipurpose deep underground facility in India.
