Facilities for research in nuclear physics in India

Nuclear physics research has been pursued in India quite vigorously since the early 1950s. Starting with the Cockcroft-Walton and Van-de-Graaff accelerators in the early periods, some of the major facilities like the Variable Energy Cyclotron, and two medium energy heavy ion tandem Pelletron accelerators were set up during the late seventies and eighties. In the past decade, superconducting linear accelerators have been added in order to boost the beam energies obtained from the Pelletron accelerators. This has expanded the region of nuclei that can be investigated using these accelerators. A superconducting cyclotron has been built at VECC, Kolkata, which will provide beams of still higher energies in the range 10-40 MeV/A depending on the mass of the accelerated species. Major facilities for pursuing experimental Nuclear Physics research using stable ions now exist at the three accelerator centres, viz., IUAC at New Delhi, TIFR at Mumbai and VECC at Kolkata. All three facilities provide heavy ion beams with energies in the region of Coulomb barrier. The detector systems built at these facilities naturally reflect the requirements of the experiments. The experiments can be classified broadly into two groups; dynamics of nuclear reactions around the Coulomb barrier and nuclear spectroscopy. In this presentation, some of the equipment and set-ups available and undergoing construction currently in relation to the type of experiments are being described and then discussed the future prospects. (author)