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Facilities
Balloon Facility (Hyderabad)
TIFR owns a full fledged Balloon Facility at its launching centre at Hyderabad (central India). This centre is equipped with trained personnel for designing, fabricating, launching and tracking large volume balloons for scientific experiments. The ground station for telemetry & telecommand transmission / reception is also well equipped with adequate hardware and software support personnel as well as equipment. The scientific experiments which now a days regularly use this balloon facility are:
- Space Astronomy:
- Far Infrared Astronomy
- X-ray & Gamma-ray Astronomy
- Atmospheric sciences, etc.
Balloons are launched during two seasons during each year : Summer (January - April) and Winter (October- December). In addition to launching balloons , this centre also regularly monitors & analyses local weather at tropospheric and stratospheric altitudes which is very crucial for making decisions about balloon launches.
More details about the facility can be found in its Home page.
Epidemiology and Dental Research, TIFR, Mumbai
FT-NMR
National facility for high-field NMR in Tata Institute of Fundamental Research , TIFR, is a premier NMR facility in India. It caters to research in NMR from both within TIFR and various educational institutions and industrial establishments in India.
Set up in 1983 with support from Department of Science and Technology, Department of Biotechnology, and Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, Government of India, it houses state of the art NMR spectrometers and other related facilities.
The facility currently houses a Varian Unity+ 600 MHz spectrometer, and a Bruker Avance 500 MHz widebore spectrometer. While the former is exclusively a solution-state NMR spectrometer, the latter can be used for both solid-state, solution-state NMR and in-vivo works.
More details about the facility can be found in its Home page.
Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope
NCRA has set up a unique facility for radio astronomical research using the metrewavelengths range of the radio spectrum, known as the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT), it is located at a site about 80 km north of Pune. GMRT consists of 30 fully steerable gigantic parabolic dishes of 45m diameter each spread over distances of upto 25 km. GMRT is one of the most challenging experimental programmes in basic sciences undertaken by Indian scientists and engineers. When completed, GMRT will become the world's most powerful radio telescope operating in the frequency range of about 50 to 1500 MHz.
More details about the facility can be found in its Home page.
Low Temperature Facility
[Low Temperature Facility] of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, (TIFR) Mumbai meets the requirement of two cryogenic fluids - liquid helium and liquid nitrogen along with other support services to various facilities and laboratories of the institute such as, Condensed Matter Physics and Materials Science (DCMP & MS), Nuclear and Atomic Physics (DNAP), Biological Sciences (DBS), Astronomy and Astrophysics (DAA), and Chemical Sciences (DCS).
Low Temperature Facility (LTF) was started in 1961 with liquefaction of helium and then a liquid nitrogen generator was added in 1968.
LTF operates and maintains the 1610 KOCH make helium liquefier and LINIT-25, liquid nitrogen generator. To meet the enhanced liquid helium demand, LTF recently installed Linde make, L-280 Helium liquefier along with the state of the art liquid helium transfer pump system. The above new L280 helium liquefier was commissioned in the month of May 2008 and is in regular operation till date.
Besides the main cryogenic plants, LTF operates and maintains many other auxiliary equipment such as: Helium feed gas compressors, Helium recovery gas compressors, Cryogenic dewars (more than 75 dewars), High pressure cylinders (about 1000 cylinders packed in 19 Quads), Mass Spectrometer Leak Detector (MSLD), Gas analyzers, Gas flow meters etc.
Instrument facilities of the institute that are supported by the cryogen from LTF are: National NMR Facility (three NMR spectrometers - 800 MHz, 600 MHz and 500 MHz), DCMPMS Facilities: three SQUID magnetometers, two Physical Property Measurement systems (PPMS) and a VSM magnetometer. The above facilities are at kept cold continuously at liquid helium temperatures.
The following laboratories are major users of liquid helium: Dilution milli-Kelvin refrigerator, Adiabatic de-magnetization milli-Kelvin refrigerator, Tunneling Point Spectroscopy, Point Contact Spectroscopy and Photo Electron Spectroscopy. In addition, about 12 other experiments also make use of liquid helium and liquid nitrogen.
After the use of liquid helium at various laboratories in the institute, the evaporated helium gas is recovered back for re-liquefaction. The Institute has a large network of recovery lines extending to various laboratories buildings of the Institute.
LTF's helium recovery system handles a large quantity of boil-off helium gas sent by various laboratories through the above recovery network, with about 85% of helium gas recovery and re-liquefaction after compressing with the high pressure helium compressors & purifying.
All the cryogen-demands are being met on demand. For enhanced user convenience, "on-line cryogens" requests and interfacing has been implemented for liquid helium, nitrogen.
To meet the above demands LOW TEMPERATURE FACILITY works in round the clock operation.
LTF also provides the service of Mass Spectrometer helium Leak Detector (MSLD) to the institute users.
More details about the facility can be found in its Home page.
Pelletron Linac Facility
The Pelletron Accelerator, set up as a collaborative project between the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, has been serving as a major facility for heavy ion accelerator based research in India since its commissioning in December, 1988. Several advanced experimental facilities have also been established at this centre to pursue research in nuclear, atomic, condensed matter physics and interdisciplinary areas. A number of application based research programmes have also been taken up using this accelerator. The research work in nuclear physics, which forms the main thrust of activities at this facility, covers areas of nuclear structure studies at high angular momentum and excitation energies and the heavy ion reaction dynamics. The accelerator has now completed 20 years of successful operation, catering to a large community of scientists in the country. While the majority of the researchers at this facility are from BARC and TIFR, the experimental community encompasses scientists and students from other research centres and universities, within and outside the country. These past years have been scientifically stimulating and very productive. More than 75 Ph.D. theses and over 400 publications in refereed international journals including 12 publications in Physical Review Letters have resulted from the research activities in this laboratory.
The accelerator has performed exceedingly well in the last two decades delivering beams ranging from proton to Iodine. Various modifications to improve the performance of the Pelletron accelerator have been implemented.
A superconducting linear accelerator has been indigenously developed to boost the energy of heavy ion beams delivered by the Pelletron accelerator. The superconducting LINAC booster phase I consisting of three accelerating modules was commissioned in 2002. In July 2007, Silicon ions were accelerated using all seven modules and were transported to the experimental stations in the first user hall. The performance was excellent with an average energy gain per cavity of 0.4 MV/q corresponding to 80% of the design value. This national facility was dedicated to users on 28th November 2007 and several experiments have been carried out with LINAC. Development of the superconducting LINAC is a major milestone in the accelerator technology in our country. Most of the critical components of the LINAC booster, the first superconducting heavy ion accelerator in India, have been designed, developed and fabricated indigenously.
More details about the facility can be found in its Home page.
Copyright : TIFR ; Author : Chaudhari Nitin ; Created on 2005-11-08 ; Last modified on 2009-06-29.