Dear Colleague, Many of you have an oppertunity to attend the INO Collaboration meeting that we had recently on 9-10 March at Delhi. Those of you who were unable to attend the meeting can look at the talks presented and see the progress made by the collaboration on various aspect of the project specially in the development of detector hard ware and in the preparation of the INO site DPR. To look at the talks presented please go to the INO meeting agenda server at the following URL http://www.hecr.tifr.res.in/MaKaC/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=15 and click on the slide icon on the right hand side. Let me also summarize here the progress made so far. Status of project approval: The proposal is currently with the Govt. of India and included in the mega science projects waiting for approval. Status of Site related DPR: An Engineering Task force under the Chairman of Shri S. Ramanujam, Associate Director, ESG, BARC and co-chaired by Shri Y.C. Manjunatha Director, ESG, IGCAR are overseeing the preparation of the site related DPR being prepared by TNEB (Tamil Nadu Electricity Board). This DPR will have detail report including cost estimate and cost breakup for various items like tunnel, underground experimental hall, surface facilities like laboratory, offices, guest house, housing etc at the PUSHEP site. It will be ready in about two weeks time. INO members from IMSc are coordinating this effort. Status of INO Centre at Mysore: As you know we plan to setup a INO centre in a city near the underground laboratory. Mysore which is 1.5 hours drive from PUSHEP will be an ideal place. Vice Chancellor of Mysore University is very keen and would like to give us all the help to set up this centre inside Mysorew University Campus. We are discussing with him the possibility of setting this centre at Mysore University. He has already yearmark two rooms in the Mysore University Physics Dept. to start an RPC testing lab there and identified a land where INO centre can come up. Progress on 40 ton ICAL prototype magnet: This prototype magnet which will house twelve 1 Sq. M RPCs at a magnetic field of about 1.5 Tesla has been fabricated at Pune. This is currently under test to see if we are getting the designed magnetic field strength. Status of fabrication of 1 Sq. M RPCs to be used in the prototype Detector: 1 Sq. M. size RPCs required for the prototype test are now being fabricated and tested at TIFR on a regular basis. These RPCs work on avalanche mode and giving good efficiencis. Different kinds of pickup strips are being tried out. Housing for holding the RPCs are also being developed. Most of the components needed to produce these RPCs are now locally produced. These includes various types of spacers gas inlet and outlets, graphite coating on the glass surface, pickup strips etc. It is really satisfying to see that our effort to develope these components locally are giving results now. Several glass RPCs are working at TIFR with good efficiency for the last one and half years. We are continiously operating those chambers to see their long time behaviour. We are very encouraged by the result. Development of the Gas mixing and gas circulation system: The RPCs operate with a gax mixture. R-134A and iso butane (5%) in the avalanche mode and Argon, R-134A and Isobutane and SF6 in the Stremer mode. So development of a good gas mixing unit and the gas circulation system is an important part of the project. We have now successfully developed a 16 channel gas mixing and gas circulation system in collaboration with a local industry at Mumbai. This has 16 resistive path (using long capillary tubes) to make sure that the flow is uniform through each path. We plan to use this gas mixing unit for the prototype test also. Our next goal in this direction is to develope a gas recirculation system where we will be able to recirculate the gas through the detector units. Development of Electronic Data Acquisition System for the Prototype Detector: The data Acquisition system from discriminator to online storage of data has been designed joinly by people from BARC electronics division and TIFR INO group members. The details of this system was presented at the Delhi INO meeting. We are however laging in one important area. Since we are operating these chambers in avalanche mode, the average pulse height is very low (1-2 milivolts). We therefore need a very fast and high gain amplifier in the front end. We do not have enough of these amplifiers with us to instrument all the RPCs in the prototype detector. An hybrid amplifier designed by BARC electronics group will be used as an interim measure (we need 1500 of these). We are about to place an order with BEL, Bangalore for producing these amplifier. Our final solution will be an ASIC design. Development of bakelite RPC: There is an attempt to develope bakelite based RPCs at SINP/VECC. A linseed oil less RPC made in China was used to start this work. An RPC made using local bakelite is now being tested and giving encouraging result. RPC test facility at IITB: A new RPC lab is comming up at IITB. We hope to use this lab soon for testing and characterising RPCs. Physics and simulation: We have an excellent group of theorists who are making the physics case of INO strong. In addition Physics simulation using the earlier developed GEANT3 based INO detector simulation package is being used regularly by INO members at IMSc, SINP and TIFR to estimate the sensitivities of INO detector for various physics topics. GEANT4 based simulation packages: Several members are getting involved in developing GEANT4 (C++) based INO simulation and analysis packages. A good place for a student or young faculty to work in collaboration with more experienced colleagues. Event Reconstruction Packages: This is one area where the new groups and members can get in as we need help to push this task. We are currently lagging in this area although some preliminary work is going on a VECC and IMSc. INO Electronic Logbook: Since INO is a multi institutional collaboration where work is going on a various centres, we have setup a web based electronic log book where all the work going on at various centres are regularly reported. Pl contact me if you want to know more about this log book and want to put you INO R & D work there. Web Monitoring of Detector status: An Web Based detector monitoring program has been developed to monitor the status of detectors under test over the internet. Here are some areas where more work are needed. Please see if you can help. We are still now using flot glass from Japan. Our earlier R & D using indian float glass shows fast ageing. More R & D is needed may be in collaboration with local glass manufacturers. We need to see if we can operate the RPCs in streamer mode over a long period of time. We need to start work on mechanical aspect of the 50 Kton magnet. Identify supplier of low carbon iron plates. Mechanical stability. simulation of mag. field etc. Although at present we are fabricating the glass RPCs in our laboratory at TIFR, we want to transfer the technology to local industry for its mass production. Need to identify company who will do the job to our satisfaction. We newed to start working on front end AsIc design as well as the design of the final DAQ system and associated software. Closs loop gas system (recirculation of glass) is another area where we need to do some R&D. Finally if you are involve in some INO related work and you would like others to know please send me an email so that I can circulate to others. Naba K Mondal For INO collaboration