V. EVENTSRIKEN Accel. Prog. Rep. 54 (2021)

RIKEN Accel. Prog. Rep. 54 (2021)

Symposium on Nuclear Data 2020
H. Otsu on behalf of the SND2020 Local Organizing Committee∗1
The Symposium on Nuclear Data 2020 (SND2020)
was held on November 26–27, 2020 at the RIBF conference room as an on-site venue, combined with online connections. This symposium originated from theﬁrst conference1) held in 1978 under the auspices of theJapan Atomic Energy Research Institute (JAERI) andJapanese Nuclear Data Committee (Sigma ResearchCommittee) and has been held almost every year since.
The Nuclear Data Division (NDD) of the Atomic Energy Society of Japan (AESJ) took over the organization of this symposium in 2006. Since then, the symposium has been organized by an executive committeeof the Nuclear Data Division. In practice, it has been
hosted in turn by JAEA, domestic universities, or otherresearch institutes every ﬁscal year.
In 2020, RIKEN Nishina Center hosted the symposium for the ﬁrst time, in order to plant the seeds forcross-disciplinary research, to promote new collaborations, and to expand the possibility of collaborations.
For the eﬀective functioning of the symposium, CNS(U-Tokyo), WSNC (KEK), and the University of Tokyo
were asked to co-host the event, and these institutes
formed the local organizing committee.
The symposium consisted of 16 invited talks, 2 tutorial lectures, and 26 poster presentations, followedby an RIBF facility tour. The full program and abstracts of the symposium are available on the SND2020
webpage.2) The invited talks covered recent topics andprogress in nuclear data activities and consisted of ﬁve
sessions: 1) accelerator facilities and nuclear data, 2)
ﬁssion and heavy-ion nuclear spectroscopy, 3) nuclear
reaction, 4) nuclear medicine and pharmacology, and5) deep learning or machine learning, and its application to nuclear physics and nuclear data. A feature ofthis year’s symposium was the inclusion of a session onmachine learning. Machine learning is expected to play
an important role in the next decade for nuclear physicsand nuclear data, where multiple variables are handled
and analyzed from raw or processed data. An introduction to the fundamentals of deep learning was provided
including its origins, history of development, and relationship with computing power, The session carefully
examined the capabilities of deep learning, examples ofcommon pitfalls, and expectations for the future.
The two tutorial lectures were dedicated to the basic
theory and actual operation of nuclear reactors. The
lectures aimed to explain how nuclear reactors are established as macroscopic systems, so that even nuclear
physics researchers, who usually understand physicalphenomena from a microscopic perspective, could understand them. It is uncertain whether the aims were∗1RIKEN Nishina CenterFig. 1. Symposium photo of on-site participants in front andon-line participants on screen.

fully achieved, but such eﬀorts are believed to be worthwhile.
Poster presentations were held using the break-out
room function of the Zoom web meeting tool. This
was necessary to prevent cluster outbreaks of COVID19 that can potentially be introduced by face-to-face
discussions. Therefore, not only on-site participants
but also online participants presented their posters remotely. The posters themselves were located on thewall at the on-site conference room. Therefore, the onsite participants were able to examine the posters not
only during the poster session, but also during coﬀeebreaks.
Figure 1 shows a group photograph of both on-siteand online participants of the symposium. Despite theCOVID-19 pandemic, which restricted public access,62 on-site participants visited RIKEN Wako campus.
Together with 59 online participants, a total of 121
researchers and students joined the symposium. TheZoom web meeting tool was utilized not only for theposter session but also for several oral presentations.
The on-site presentations were distributed via Zoom,
and the remote presentations were shown on the screen
at the conference room. Therefore, this conference washeld in the hybrid model of on-site and remote participation. This model will be followed in the future
as well. The next year’s symposium will be hosted byJ-PARC.
References

1) Proc. the 1978 Seminar on Nuclear Data, https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Pub
lic/11/537/11537325.pdf .
2) https://indico2.riken.jp/e/snd2020 .

- 195 -1