On 2 September, KEK in Japan held a laboratory open house. About 4600 people visited KEK’s Tsukuba campus, one-and-a-half times as many as last year. Presumably one of the reasons for the pushed-up number of visitors was the discovery of Higgs-like particle at CERN.
At the ILC exhibit, particle badges exclusively designed for the open house were given away as a souvenir. Visitors who called upon three ILC-related exhibits at KEK, namely the Accelerator Test Facility (ATF), Superconducting RF Test Facility (STF) and a poster exhibit at the Kenkyu-Honkan building, were eligible for one turn on a “Gachapon”, or a capsule toy vending machine. Eight badge designs were available: electron and positron, dark matter, top quark, gluon, W boson, Higgs, SUSY Higgs, and ILC.
The machine contained many more electrons and gluons than Higgses, so only the lucky visitors could find the Higgs in their capsules. On top of that, the luckiest eight visitors found a piece of paper in their capules reading “I found a Higgs!?”. They also received a Higgs action figure.
The little girl on the right with big smile was the first winner of the Higgs figure. Her sister got an electron-positron badge.
This ILC stamp rally event was also pretty popular among the visitors. Almost the entire stock of 1300 badges disappeared.
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