Mambillikalathil Govind Kumar Menon

Infobox_Scientist
name = Mambillikalathil Govind Kumar Menon


imagesize =
birth_date = birth date|1828|08|28
birth_place = Mangalore, Karnataka, India
nationality = Indian
field = Physics
alma_mater = Jaswant College
Royal Institute of Science
University of Bristol
work_institution = Tata Institute of Fundamental Research
Indian Space Research Organization
Department of Science & Technology, Government of India
doctoral_advisor = Cecil F. Powell
known_for = KGF Experiments
prizes = Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology (1960)
religion = Hindu
footnotes =

Mambillikalathil Govind Kumar Menon (born August 28, 1928), also known as M.G.K. Menon, is a physicist and policy maker from India.He has had a role in almost every facet of science and technology development in India during the past four decades. but the important one was nurturing the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, which his mentor Homi J. Bhabha founded in 1945. He undertook experiments with cosmic rays to explore the properties of fundamental particles. He was instrumental in setting up balloon flight experiments, as well as deep underground experiments with cosmic ray neutrinos in the mines at Kolar Gold Fields. He is currently Vikram Sarabhai Fellow of the Indian Space Research Organisation. In the past, he has been President of the National Academy of Sciences, India, Director of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai (1966-1975), Chairman Board Of Governors, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay and Chairman Board of Governors of the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad. He has won the Abdus Salam Award, and is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. He is one of the prominent scientists from Kerala. The asteroid 7564 Gokumenon was named in his honour in late 2008.MPCit_JPL|7564

Early life

Education

M.G.K Menon was educated at Jaswant College, Jodhpur, and the (Royal) Institute of Science, Bombay, before he moved to the University of Bristol for his Ph.D in elementary particle physics under the guidance of Nobel Laureate Cecil F. Powell in 1953.

Association with TIFR

He joined TIFR in 1955 "essentially because of Bhabha", and the association lasted nearly five decades. He became the director of the institute in 1966, at the age of 38, following Bhabha's untimely death. In fact, M.G.K Menon began handling the affairs of the institute ever since he was barely 33 because of Bhabha's increasing involvement with the country's nascent atomic energy programme.

KGF experiments

M.G.K Menon was involved in all the large-scale experiments at the TIFR from its early days, in particular, the cosmic ray studies initiated in 1964 in the mines at Kolar Gold Fields (KGF). In the nearly three-decade-long story of experiments at the KGF, relating to muons, neutrinos, weak interactions and proton decay, he played a major role. It was the KGF experiment that ruled out the hypothesis called "Utah Effect" to describe the energy spectrum of muons reaching underground.

The more significant achievement of the KGF experiment was to demonstrate the feasibility of doing neutrino-induced interactions and related new phenomena deep underground. It was also the first experiment in the world, in 1965, to detect atmospheric neutrinos, which are formed at the top of the atmosphere due to cosmic ray interactions. The neutrino experiments also threw up a handful of rare events, called Kolar events, which are suggestive of massive (with more that 3 giga electron Volt mass) and long-lived (lifetimes of about a billionth of a second) particles. These have, however remained unexplained till date and are perhaps suggestive of new physics.

In the 1980s, M.G.K Menon led the proton decay experiment at the KGF, the first major dedicated experiment in the world to look for decays of the apparently stable proton, which set a limit on a proton's lifetime to be greater than 10 to the power 30 years. The experiment also provided limits on the existence of the hypothetical magnetic monopoles.

However, with the closure of the KGF mines, these underground cosmic ray experiments came to an end in the early 1990s, much to the disappointment of many Indian particle physicists. It was the atmospheric neutrinos that later led to the Nobel Prize-winning discovery by Japanese scientists—who in fact, started later—that neutrinos have mass and they exhibit the interesting phenonmenon called neutrino oscillation.

External links

* [http://www.here-now4u.de/eng/impact_of_advances_in_science_.htm Article by Menon: Impact of Advances in science and new technologies on society]
* [http://www.4to40.com/legends/index.asp?article=legends_mgkmenon Article on Menon]
* [http://openvault.wgbh.org/wapina/barcode48888menon_3/index.html/ Interview about India's nuclear program] for the WGBH series, War and Peace in the Nuclear Age
* Activists Condemn Gujarat Violence, Screen New Documentary [http://www.asata.org/node/97]