A new x-ray light source for a new university

The financial crisis of 2008 and the continuing debt crisis in the eurozone have stifled growth in the US, Western Europe, and elsewhere. If asked to predict when robust growth will return, some economists cite the sorry case of Japan, whose economy, the world’s third largest, has been stagnant for the past two decades—the Lost Years (失われた20年, Ushinawareta Nijūnen) in Japanese. If a country doesn’t implement the right policies, the economists warn, it risks languishing in the doldrums as Japan has.

But despite its stagnant economy, Japan’s physics enterprise remains vibrant—and ambitious, as exemplified by Kamiokande, the nucleon decay experiment at Kamioka, a village in Gifu Prefecture.

Completed in 1983, he first Kamiokande experiment consisted of 3000 tons of water contained in a 16-meter-high tank whose inner surface was lined with 1000 photomultiplier tubes. The goal of the experiment was to watch for flashes of Cherenkov radiation that manifest rare, hypothesized proton decays.

In 1985 Kamiokande was upgraded to characterize the flux of neutrinos that stream from the Sun. Kamiokande II did just that. It also detected 11 neutrinos from Supernova 1987A. Those precious neutrinos reached Earth three hours before the supernova’s first visible photons did. The difference in arrival time suggested that neutrinos have mass.

Super Kamiokande, which began taking data in 1996, is a new and bigger version of Kaniokande II. Its 41-meter-high tank contains 50 000 tons of water and 11 000 photomultiplier tubes. By 2002, Super KamiokaNDE had seen enough neutrinos to prove that neutrinos oscillate between different mass states.

Detecting proton decay, the goal of the original Kamiokande and a goal of Super Kamiokande, remains beyond the abilities of current experiments. Undeterred—and inspired by that challenge—physicists in Japan are planning Hyper KamiokaNDE, which will be 10 times bigger than its Super predecessor. The ambitiously huge leap forward in size is reflected by a Japanese pun: When spoken, “kamiokande” can be understood to mean 神を噛んで (bite into God).

Looking outward

As the Lost Years continued, some Japanese people began to turn inward and become less interested in the rest of the world. That insularity is not shared by Japan’s science establishment. To prosper scientifically, Japan needs to attract foreign students, postdocs, and professors. At 8.2 births per 1000 people, the country’s birthrate is the world’s second lowest after Germany’s 8.1. What’s more, as America’s swelling roster of Nobel-winning immigrants demonstrates, foreign researchers enrich domestic science.

In 2007 the Japanese government launched the World Premier International Research Center Initiative. Its goal, as declared on its website , is to build

The qualities of ambition and looking outward are both represented in Japan’s newest university, the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology , which is shown here. Research at OIST is inherently interdisciplinary and is focused on five areas: neuroscience, molecular sciences, environmental sciences, ecological sciences, and physical sciences.

But what makes OIST special, besides its newness, is the international makeup of its faculty and students. More than half of the OIST community comes from outside Japan. Instruction is in English, not Japanese. Only 20 students—all working toward PhDs—are accepted each year. The student-to-faculty ratio is 2:1.

OIST’s stated aim is to “recruit the best students in the world to work in an environment that encourages creativity, uniqueness, and diversity.” To help meet that ambitious goal, OIST has just announced that it intends to buy a compact, laboratory-sized x-ray light source (XLS).

Appropriately for an internationally minded institution, OIST has issued a call for expression of interest to vendors worldwide. If you know of any XLS manufacturers, please send them the link. The deadline is 23 February.