Source: ET via Wasim Sr.
Pakistani engineer Amir Aijaz (left) explains the repair work of the Large Hadron Collider to CERN Director General Rolf-Dieter Heuer at CERN in Geneva. PHOTO COURTESY: DR HAFEEZ HOORANI
In fact, at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), not only did electronics manufactured in Pakistan help in the detection of the Higgs boson, the elementary particle scientists believe imparts mass to all particles, Pakistani engineers and technicians are also currently participating in repairs of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the highest energy particle accelerator in the world.
Pakistan’s collaboration with CERN, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, first started in 1994 through the efforts of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC), said Dr Hafeez Hoorani, the director of research at the National Centre for Physics (NCP) in Islamabad. The NCP became a part of PAEC’s collaboration with CERN after it was established in 1999.
At present, the NCP is one of the hundreds of grid nodes in the world that receive scientific data from the LHC, which are being used by NCP researchers and students.
“We as a nation should be proud of the fact that today Pakistan is part of an experiment which is the most exciting and challenging experiments of all times,” Hoorani, who has worked at CERN himself, said. “This project helps our students get involved in cutting-edge research.”