To carry out research in the emerging eld of neutrino physics, the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) Collaboration is making sincere attempts to build a world-class underground laboratory at Pottipuram in Bodi West hills of Theni District of Tamil Nadu. Once completed, it will be the largest basic science project in India. The proposed laboratory will house a fifty (50) kiloton magnetized iron calorimeter (ICAL) detector to detect the atmospheric neutrinos and antineutrinos separately over a wide range of energies and path lengths. The prime focus of this experiment is to explore the Earth's matter effect by observing the energy and zenith angle dependence of the atmospheric neutrinos in the multi-GeV range. This study will be quite useful to address some of the outstanding issues in neutrino oscillation physics and to provide a rigorous test of the three flavor neutrino oscillation framework in the presence of the Earth's matter effect.

Institute of Physics (IOP) is actively involved in the mega-science India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) project of our country. We are playing a leading role in the physics and detector simulation studies related to the Iron Calorimeter (ICAL) detector at the INO facility. Several INO Ph.D. students are being trained at IOP. Our high quality research work helped the INO Collaboration immensely to come up with a strong physics case in support of the ICAL atmospheric neutrino experiment at the INO facility and to convince the community about the uniqueness of this experiment.We demonstrated for the first time that by adding the hadron energy information to the muon energy and muon direction in each event, the sensitivity of the ICAL atmospheric neutrino detector in measuring the oscillation parameters can be enhanced significantly (see http://arxiv.org/abs/arXiv:1406.3689). Undoubtedly, this is a very important and high-quality work, which will be quite useful for the ICAL-INO and other atmospheric neutrino oscillation experiments.

We have shown that the proposed 50 kiloton Magnetized Iron CALorimeter (MagICAL) detector under the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) project can play an important role in the indirect searches of Galactic diffuse dark matter in the neutrino and antineutrino mode separately (see http://arxiv.org/abs/arXiv:1703.10221).

We have explored in detail the possible impacts of long-range flavor-diagonal neutral current interactions due to Le − Lμ and Le − Lτ symmetries (one at-a-time) in the context of 50 kiloton magnetized ICAL detector at INO (see https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.00949).

We have performed a detailed analysis for the prospects of detecting active-sterile oscillations involving a light sterile neutrino, over a large ∆m²₄₁ range of 10^-5 eV² to 10² eV², using 10 years of atmospheric neutrino data expected from the proposed 50 kiloton magnetized ICAL detector at the INO. This detector can observe the atmospheric muon neutrino and muon antineutrino separately over a wide range of energies and baselines, making it sensitive to the magnitude and sign of ∆m²₄₁ over a large range (see http://arxiv.org/abs/arXiv:1804.09613).

We have played an important role in preparing the INO-ICAL Physics White Paper which has been published in the Journal Pramana and has already received around 150 citations (see http://arxiv.org/abs/arXiv:1505.07380).

We have also given several presentations on the status and prospects of INO at various national and international level. We are also actively participating in the outreach activities related to the INO project.

Faculty Involved: Prof. Sanjib Kumar Agarwalla (email: sanjib@iopb.res.in, office: +91-674-230-6427, mobile: +91-917884565)

Present INO Students at IOP: Mr. Anil Kumar, Mr. Sadashiv Sahoo

Past INO Students at IOP: Dr. Amina Khatun (presently working as postdoc at Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia)

For more information related to the INO Project, see http://www.ino.tifr.res.in/ino/

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