Clarifying the credit for KamLAND

Our colleague Giorgio Gratta of Stanford University pointed out to us that our obituary for Stuart Freedman (Physics Today, March 2013, page 72 ) ought to have credited Atsuto Suzuki alone with the realization that power reactors in Japan were fortuitously situated to allow a long-baseline reactor antineutrino experiment, KamLAND.

US involvement in KamLAND began in 1997, under the leadership of Gratta, with groups from the University of Alabama, Caltech, Duke University, the University of New Mexico, North Carolina State University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Stanford University, the University of Tennessee, and the College of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. The basic configuration of KamLAND had been defined by 1998 when the Oak Ridge group withdrew and Freedman’s Berkeley group joined. The Berkeley physicists designed the readout electronics and were instrumental in calibration. During the construction, commissioning, and data taking, Freedman and Gratta were US cospokesmen for KamLAND.