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Tag archive: Japan

Understanding something new — interview with Makoto Kobayashi

| 26 November 2008 It has been hectic days for Makoto Kobayashi, Professor emeritus at KEK, since 7 October, the announcement of 2008 Nobel Prize in physics. Now that one month has passed, Kobayashi finally gets to settle down a little (or he has gotten used to keeping up with a demanding schedule), he shared his time to talk about the future of accelerator science with ILC NewsLine. Category: Feature | Tagged: ,

2008 Nobel Prize goes to particle physics

| 9 October 2008 This year's Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to a Japanese-born American and two Japanese particle physicists: Yoichiro Nambu, professor emeritus at University of Chicago, for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics, Makoto Kobayashi, professor emeritus at KEK and executive director of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and Toshihide Maskawa, professor at Kyoto Sangyo University in Kyoto, for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature. Category: Around the World | Tagged: ,

World beam test tour at Fermilab

| 2 October 2008 The International Linear Collider requires a detector with excellent performance to fully exploit its physics potential. In order to meet this challenge, significant improvements in the calorimetric performance are needed compared to previous generations of detectors, and new technologies and techniques are being developed. To test those technologies and techniques with particle beams, scientists are travelling around the world, to where beamlines with particle beams for tests are available. Category: Feature | Tagged: , , ,

ILC goes Comiket

| 21 August 2008 This summer the International Linear Collider made a debut in world famous "Comiket" Comic Market, held in Tokyo. Comike is the world's largest comic convention with a history of over a quarter of a century, and is the hall of fame of the "Otaku" culture. More than half a million attendees came from all over the world for this three-day event. So, what did all these people come for? The answer is the "doujinshi," self-published publications which are usually manga or novels. Most works are written and edited by amateur writers or artists, but some are famous professionals who started from doujinshi. People wanting to buy their works sometimes have to wait for more than three hours. Category: Feature | Tagged:

Federation beyond policy difference

| 7 August 2008 A day before Japanese cabinet reshuffling, Diet members and other senior government officials took time out from their busy schedule to attend the inaugural meeting of newly formed "Federation of Diet members to promote the realisation of ILC" with a group with representatives from all political parties in Japan: Liberal Democratic party (LDP), Democratic party of Japan (DPJ), New Komeito (NK), Social Democratic Party (SDP), The People's New Party (PNP), and Japanese Communist Party (JCP). The federation's letter of intent describes its aim the promotion of the ILC project recognising that particle physics, as a research field with no ethnical, national or ideological borders, is the essential part of the nation's basic science research strategy. Category: Around the World | Tagged: ,

Enjoying cool science

| 24 July 2008 On the first day of a three-day weekend with a Japanese national holiday, Day of the Sea, about 300 people changed their destination from seaside to science. They enjoyed talks on cool science on a hot Saturday afternoon in Tokyo at a symposium called “Denshi-koraidah ga toku ucyu sousei no puzzle (Solving the puzzle of the universe with electron-positron colliders),” organised by KEK. The symposium introduced the science to be delivered by future electron-positron colliders to a non-scientific audience. The symposium was a two-part event. The first part consisted of talks by three top-notch scientists – Hitoshi Murayama, Director General of Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (IPMU), Shoken Miyama, Director General of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, and Atsuto Suzuki, Director General of KEK. The second part was a panel discussion with those three scientists and Shinji Kimoto, a science-fiction novelist who wrote the award-winning novel 'Kamisama no Puzzle', and was moderated by Shigehiko Nakajima, Editor-in-Chief of Nikkei Science Magazine, the Japanese edition of Scientific American. Category: Feature | Tagged: , ,

From KEK Director’s Corner: Obituary: Yoji Totsuka, Former Director General of KEK

17 July 2008 Yoji Totsuka, the former director general of KEK and an outstanding contributor to great advances in neutrino physics, died of cancer at the age of 66 on Thursday, July 10. Category: Feature | Tagged:

A personal tribute to Yoji Totsuka

| 17 July 2008 High-energy physics lost a giant in our field - and I lost a very good personal friend - when Yoji Totsuka, the former Director General of KEK, died of cancer at the age of 66 last week. I would like to pay special tribute to a great scientist and wonderful human being. Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: ,

Creating polarised positron beams

3 July 2008 The PosiPol2008 workshop was held from 16 to 18 June in Hiroshima, Japan. An unfamiliar word, "PosiPol" stands for "polarised positrons", meaning that the "spins" of positrons are aligned when they meet electrons at the centre of a linear collider. The electron beam is designed to be polarised at the ILC, but according to the baseline configuration positrons are unpolarised (or left naturally polarised) because making polarised positron is a difficult task to do. Category: Around the World | Tagged: , , ,

ILC physics subgroup meeting at KEK

26 June 2008 On May 31 we had a meeting of our ILC physics subgroup, which is a mixture of experimentalists and theorists working in Japan. The meeting was the fifth in a series that started about a year ago, and each time 20 to 30 people got together to monitor and discuss the direction of the subgroup’s activities. The primary task of the subgroup is to reexamine the ILC physics in the context of the expected LHC results and to further strengthen the physics case for the ILC project. Category: Around the World | Tagged: ,