Washington — A new collaborative agreement “is the latest step in the deepening cooperation between the U.S. and India on a range of clean energy and scientific fronts,” U.S. Deputy Secretary of Energy Daniel Poneman said July 25.
The U.S. Department of Energy and the Indian Department of Atomic Energy are working together to help advance discovery in the field of accelerator and particle detector research.
Poneman and Srikumar Banerjee, chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission, signed the agreement on the sidelines of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s visit to India for the second round of the U.S.-India Strategic Dialogue in New Delhi July 19.
“Working together, we will be able to further our collective understanding of accelerators and high-energy particles, pursue new technologies and scientific discoveries, and advance our shared clean energy goals,” Poneman said.
Laboratories use accelerators and particle detectors to detect, track and identify high-energy particles, such as those produced by nuclear decay or cosmic radiation. Several industries use accelerators that produce beams of charged particles. These industries include medical diagnosis and treatment, electronics, and security and defense.
Speaking at the Anna Centenary Library in Chennai, India, July 20, Clinton said India’s advancements in science and technology and its vibrant example of democracy will help to enrich human lives around the world.
A high-priority goal of the U.S.-India collaboration is to look at new technologies to produce clean, safe and reliable energy to help India develop energy independence and support a population of 1.3 billion people.
The agreement provides the U.S. and Indian energy agencies a legal framework to build on existing collaborations and create new projects in high-energy physics and nuclear physics. Through their collaborative research, scientists hope to gain a better understanding of the matter and energy that form the universe.
The pact also builds on a long history of successful scientific collaborations between the United States and India. Past research and development partnerships have resulted in important scientific advances, including the discovery of a fundamental constituent of matter, which scientists believe formed an instant after the universe began and has a temperature of around 4 trillion degrees Celsius, the hottest temperature ever reached in a laboratory.
This new agreement is part of a planned long-term collaborative effort on climate research that DOE began with India’s science-related agencies early in 2011. Other shared efforts include the third annual Women in Science workshop, which the United States and India plan to co-host in September.