News

Hitoshi Murayama Named
University Professor

On March 27,
2019, the Universityof Tokyo announced
that Kavli IPMU
Principal Investigator
Hitoshi Murayama
Hitoshi Murayama
had been given the
new title of University Professor. The
university established this new title
to recognize important individuals
within the institution who are making
significant contributions to his or her
academic field internationally, and
who are continuing to lead research
activities that will contribute tofurther developments in their fieldin the future. Murayama is one offour academics to be given this title,
which took effect from April 1.
Masami Ouchi Awarded 15th
JSPS Prize and Japan Academy
Medal

Masami Ouchi,
University ofTokyo Institutefor Cosmic Ray
Research Associate
Masami Ouchi
Professor and Kavli
IPMU Scientist,
was awarded the 15th JSPS (Japan
Society for the Promotion of Science)Award and the 15th Japan Academy
Medal in recognition of his work32

Observational Studies of the Early
Universe with Lyα Emitters. An
award ceremony was held at The
Japan Academy on February 7, 2019.
The JSPS Prize recognizes young
researchers with fresh ideas, whohave the potential to become world
leaders in their field. The purpose of
the Japan Academy Medal is to honor
outstanding young researchers. Up tosix awardees (6 researchers this year)
are selected every year from among
the annual winners of the JSPS Prize(25 researchers this year).
Masamune Oguri Awarded This
Year s Hayashi Chushiro Prize

Masamune Oguri,
the University ofTokyo ResearchCenter for the Early
Universe Assistant
Masamune Oguri
Professor and Kavli
IPMU Associate
Scientist, has been awarded the fiscal
year 2018 Hayashi Chushiro Prize.
The prize recognizes researchers
who have made significant
contributions to planetary science,
astronomy, or astrophysics, andhas been awarded since 1996
by the Astronomical Society ofJapan. The prize itself was madeto commemorate the lifetime
achievements of outstanding
Japanese theoretical astrophysicist
Chushiro Hayashi.
Oguri has been recognized forhis contribution to the fundamental
understanding of gravitational lensing
in astronomy. He has for a long timestudied gravitational lensing from atheoretical and observational pointof-view, which has provided valuable
insight into studies in cosmology andastronomy.

Kavli IPMU News No. 45 March 2019

Belle II Experiment Starts Taking
Data

Kavli IPMU is participating in the
Belle II experiment hosted by KEK. It
is an asymmetric electron-positron
colliding beam experiment aiming tofind new physics beyond the standard
model. On March 11, 2019, it wasannounced the SuperKEKB project
had started phase 3, which meant
taking and analyzing real electronpositron collision data.
The SuperKEKB project has
involved two major ingredients. One
is upgrading the asymmetric electronpositron colliding-beam accelerator
KEKB, which was in operation
between 1999 and 2010 and broke
the world record for electron-positron
collision frequency (called luminosity),
to the SuperKEKB accelerator.
The new accelerator has 40 times
higher design luminosity than its
predecessor. The other is a new
detector called Belle II, placed aroundthe collision point. The project has
been moving towards completion,achieving several milestones on
the way, which have been calledphases 1, 2, and 3. In phase 1, theSuperKEKB accelerator had its firstsuccessful test run in February 2017.
For phase 2, researchers successfully
installed components, including the
Belle II detector, into the accelerator.
They carried out an electron-positron
collision in March 2018 and observed
the first collision event by the Belle IIdetector in April that year. Then, theBEAST (a dedicated detector system
for machine commissioning) in theheart of the Belle II detector was
replaced with the VerteX Detector(VXD), inching the project towards
taking its first real data in the phase
3 period.

The Belle II detector (Credit：Rey.Hori/KEK).

The VXD is particularly importantbecause it will analyze the particles
and anti-particles in detail, looking
for differences in behavior. If an
undiscovered particle such as dark
matter does exist, it is likely the VXD
would play an important role in its
discovery. Such a finding would open
a new world of physics. Kavli IPMU
researchers had finished constructing
and commissioning a part of the
Silicon Vertex Detector (SVD), which
resides inside the VXD, in May last year
(see Kavli IPMU News No. 42, p. 17).
The researchers will continue tocontribute to the project, analyzing
the new data that is about to come in,and hopefully uncover a new branchof physics.
Kavli IPMU / ELSI / IRCN 4th Joint
Public Lecture: A Question of
Origins

On January 20, 2019, the 4th
Public Lecture series A Question of
Origins was held at the Miraikan in
Odaiba, Tokyo. The first three eventsof this public lecture series had been
jointly hosted by the two WPI centers
Kavli IPMU and the Tokyo Instituteof Technology s Earth-Life Science
Institute (ELSI). This year, the Universityof Tokyo s International ResearchCenter for Neurointelligence (IRCN),a new WPI center selected in 2017,
joined as a co-hosting institute. Kavli
IPMU, ELSI, and IRCN respectively
pursue the origin of the Universe, theorigin of the Earth and life, and theorigin of human intelligence. These

three WPI centers planned this public
lecture as an event to convey thelatest findings of their research in aneasy-to-understand way, as well as tooffer a diverse range of perspectives
under a common theme A Questionof Origins, which is fundamental to
mankind.
After an opening address by WPIProgram Director Akira Ukawa, ELSI
Project Associate Professor Yutetsu
Kuruma talked about understanding
the origin of life by an artificial cellsynthesis, IRCN Principal Investigator
Kuniyoshi Sakai talked about theorigin of human intelligence, andKavli IPMU Principal Investigator Hiraku
Nakajima talked about a geometricalapproach to the origin of the universe.

AAAS 2019 Annual Meeting inWashington D.C .

The American Association for the
Advancement of Science (AAAS)
2019 annual meeting was heldat the Marriot Wardman Park in
Washington D.C. from February 14
through 17, 2019. At this AAAS annual
meeting, the Japanese Ministry of
Education, Culture, Sports, Scienceand Technology (MEXT), the Japan
Society for the Promotion of Science(JSPS), and the WPI centers including
the Kavli IPMU jointly hosted the WPIbooth for three days starting February
15 to raise global visibility of the WPI
program, and make the WPI centersbetter known by overseas researchers
so that they recognize the WPI centers
as a place to do their research. During
the three days, the WPI booth was
visited by about 120 people, including
researchers, journalists, and students.
Kavli IPMU Seminars

Kavli IPMU Principal Investigator Hiraku Nakajima
giving a talk.

After the lectures, the three
speakers took part in a round tablediscussion entitled What does itmean to question origins? which wasmoderated by Yukihiro Nobuhara,
Professor of the Graduate School ofArts and Sciences, the University ofTokyo, who specializes in philosophyof mind. Finally, there was a discussion
between the lecturers and theaudience, and the event ended
successfully.

Round-table discussion. From left to right: Yukihiro
Nobuhara , Yutetsu Kuruma , Kuniyoshi Sakai , andHiraku Nakajima.

1.

The activation of black holes andthe accretion rates onto them
depend both on gas fraction andbulge types
Speaker: Hassen Yesuf (KIAA
Beijing)
Date: Jan 10, 2019
2. Binary neutron star formationand the origin of GW170817
Speaker: Chris Belczynski (Nicolaus
Copernicus Astronomical Center,
Polish Academy of Sciences)
Date: Jan 15, 2019
3. Melonic supertensor models
Speaker: Chi-Ming Chang (UCDavis)
Date: Jan 15, 2019
4. Compensating strong couplingwith large charge - Part I
Speaker: Susanne Reffert (U Bern)
Date: Jan 15, 2019
5. Decaying particles at the MeV

33

News

scale: connection to dark matter,
BBN and the CMB
Speaker: Sebastian Wild (DESY)
Date: Jan 16, 2019
6. From Galaxy Zoo to LSST: Citizen
Science and the rise of themachines
Speaker: Chris Lintott (U Oxford)
Date: Jan 16, 2019
7. The progenitors of core-collapse
supernova explosions
Speaker: Carl Fields (Michigan
State U)
Date: Jan 17, 2019
8. Compensating strong couplingwith large charge - Part II
Speaker: Domenico Orlando (INFN)
Date: Jan 17, 2019
9. An exploratory study of Higgsboson pair production at hadroncolliders
Speaker: Chih-Ting Lu (NCTS
Taiwan)Date: Jan 17, 2019
10. Graph neural network for stop
pair and htt productions at the
LHC
Speaker: Jin Min Yang (ITP, Beijing)
Date: Jan 18, 2019
11. Classifying 5d SCFTs using CalabiYau 3-folds
Speaker: Patrick Jefferson(Harvard U)
Date: Jan 22, 201912. The derived Riemann-Hilbertcorrespondence
Speaker: Mauro Porta(U Strasbourg)
Date: Jan 22, 201913. Partially Composite
Supersymmetry
Speaker: Tony Gherghetta(U Minnesota)
Date: Jan 23, 2019
14. The Swampland Conjectures andsome Physics Implications
Speaker: Luis Ibanez (UAM)
Date: Jan 24, 2019

34

15.

The Restless Universe (How the
Periodic Table Got Built up)
Speaker: Shri Kulkarni (Caltech)
Date: Jan 24, 201916. Black hole entropy and (0,4)
SCFTs from F-theory
Speaker: Kilian Mayer (U Utrecht)
Date: Jan 29, 201917. Supersymmetric Super-GUT
ModelsSpeaker: Jason Evans (KIAS)
Date: Jan 30, 201918. Recent progress of Volume
Conjectures
Speaker: Qingtao Chen (NYU, Abu
Dhabi)
Date: Jan 31, 2019
19. Imprint of double-detonation
mechanism in early light curves forType Ia supernovae
Speaker: Petr Baklanov (ITEP
Moscow)
Date: Jan 31, 2019
20. Galaxies and their dark matter
halos, an observer s perspective
Speaker: Alessandro Sonnenfeld(Leiden U.)
Date: Jan 31, 2019
21. The epoch of reionization with
the Prime Focus SpectographSpeaker: Sune Toft (DAWN,
Copenhagen)Date: Feb 01, 201922. Highest weight categories andexact categories
Speaker: Agnieszka Bodzenta(U Warsaw)
Date: Feb 01, 2019
23. Limit on the Axion Decay
Constant from the Cooling NeutronStar in Cassiopeia A
Speaker: Jiaming Zheng (U Tokyo)
Date: Feb 06, 201924. Precision Cosmology from
Gravitationally Lensed Supernovae
Speaker: Peter Nugent (LBNL)
Date: Feb 07, 201925. Motivic Chern classes and Iwahori

Kavli IPMU News No. 45 March 2019

invariants of principal series
Speaker: Changjian Su (U Toronto)
Date: Feb 12, 201926. Challenges for cosmology in theswampland era
Speaker: Pablo Soler (Heidelberg U)
Date: Feb 12, 2019
27. Representations of quivers over
Frobenius algebras
Speaker: Tamas Hausel (IST Austria)
Date: Feb 12, 201928. Non-standard electroweak phasetransitions in extensions to thestandard model: Monopoles andScale invariance
Speaker: Suntharan Arunasalam(U Sydney)
Date: Feb 12, 201929. Recent advances in lattice weakmatrix elements for searching new
physics
Speaker: Amarjit Soni (BNL)
Date: Feb 13, 201930. A stack of broken lines,
associativity, and Morse theory ofa point
Speaker: Hiro Tanaka (MSRI
Berkeley)
Date: Feb 14, 2019
31. Leptogenesis via Neutrino
Oscillation
Speaker: Yuta Hamada (Cretecenter for theoretical physics,
U Crete)Date: Feb 15, 201932. Studying QCD modeling of
uncertainties in photon spectrafrom dark matter annihilation
Speaker: Adil Jueid (Shanghai Key
Laboratory for Particle Physics andCosmology, Shanghai Jiao Tong U)
Date: Feb 15, 201933. Schrödinger, Klein-Gordon andDirac equations, atomic wave
functions and operator productexpansion
Speaker: Yu Jia (IHEP, Beijing)
Date: Feb 18, 2019

34. Fundamental physics with multimessenger cosmology
Speaker: Alvise Raccanelli (CERN)
Date: Feb 18, 201935. The fundamental planefor Gamma-Ray Burst X-ray
afterglows
Speaker: Maria Dainotti(Jagiellonian U / Stanford U)
Date: Feb 19, 201936. Towards new science with LSST:
Tools and techniques for mining
large datasets
Speaker: Mario Juric(U Washington)
Date: Feb 21, 201937. "Intrinsic Mirror Symmetry"
Speaker: Mark Gross (U Cambridge)
Date: Feb 25, 201938. Flux compactifications and thehierarchy problem
Speaker: Wilfried Buchmuller(DESY)
Date: Feb 25, 201939. Towards a 5-sigma constraint on
the sum of the neutrino masses
Speaker: Francisco A . V. Navarro(Center for Computational
Astrophysics, Flatiron Inst)
Date: Feb 25, 201940. Holographic Complexity in theJackiw-Teitelboim Gravity
Speaker: Kanato Goto (U Tokyo)
Date: Feb 26, 201941. Mimetic Gravity: Pros and Cons
Speaker: Mohammad Ali Gorji(Inst for Research in Fundamental
Sciences)
Date: Feb 26, 201942. Tabletop experiments using lightand atomSpeaker: Shoji Asai (U Tokyo)
Date: Feb 27, 201943. Firewalls in General Relativity
Speaker: Surjeet Rajendran (UCBerkeley)
Date: Feb 28, 201944. Broad composite resoance andits signals at the LHC
Speaker: Ke-Pan Xie (Seoul
National U)
Date: Mar 01, 2019
45. Integrated approach tocosmology
Speaker: Andrina Nicola(Princeton U)
Date: Mar 01, 201946. Equivalent Calabi-Yau manifolds
via GLSM
Speaker: Michal Kapustka (Inst of
Mathematics, Warsaw)
Date: Mar 05, 201947. Black hole entropy, hyperbolic
3-manifold and anlaytic torsion
Speaker: Dongmin Gang (Seoul
National U)
Date: Mar 05, 2019
continued on page 26 →project researcher.
Kavli IPMU postdoctoral fellow
Miho Ishigaki [April 01, 2013
– August 31, 2015 as a JSPS
postdoctoral fellow, and then –January 31, 2019 as a Kavli IPMU
postdoctoral fellow] moved to Tohoku
University as a project researcher.
Kavli IPMU postdoctoral fellow
Michihisa Takeuchi [October 1, 2014
– March 31, 2019] moved to thecenter for Theoretical Studies, Nagoya
University as an Associate Professor.
JSPS postdoctoral fellow
Naonori Sugiyama [November 1,
2014 – March 31, 2016 as a Kavli
IPMU postdoctoral fellow, andthen – March 31, 2019 as a JSPS
postdoctoral fellow] moved to NAOJ
as a Project Assistant Professor (NAOJ
Fellow).

Personnel Changes

The following people left the Kavli
IPMU to work at other institutes.
Their time at the Kavli IPMU is shownin square brackets.
Kavli IPMU Professor Tsutom
Yanagida [October 1, 2007 – March
31, 2017 as an IPMU/Kavli IPMU
Principal Investigator and April 1
2009 – March 31, 2019 as an IPMU/
Kavli IPMU Professor] moved to
Shanghai Jiao Tong University as aDistinguished Chair Professor.
Kavli IPMU postdoctoral fellow
Chengcheng Han [September 16,
2015 – March 31, 2019] moved
to Nanjing Normal University as a
postdoctoral fellow.
Kavli IPMU postdoctoral fellow
Akishi Ikeda [April 1, 2015 – March
31, 2019] moved to Osaka University
as a Specially Appointed Associate
Professor (Part time).
Kavli IPMU postdoctoral fellow
Shigeki Inoue [April 1, 2016 – March
31, 2019] moved to NAOJ as a

Editor s Note

As announced on page 3, this is
the last issue of Kavli IPMU News.
The editor thanks all the readersof this magazine. Since the launchof IPMU, many administrative
members contributed in publishing
IPMU News / Kavli IPMU News. I
would particularly like to thankRika Tanaka and Miyuki Onuki, who
served as assistant editors duringcertain periods, Fusae Miyazoe,
Tomomi Hijikata, Marina Komori, andMotoko Kakubayashi, who served
as members of the public relations
team, Aya Tsuboi, who uploaded themagazine online, Yuuko Enomoto,
Midori Ozawa, Akiko Fujita, andRieko Tamura, who provided various
information, and Kayoko Kubota,
Ayako Nakada, Mika Miura, andShoko Ichikawa, who managed the listof mailing addresses for IPMU News /Kavli IPMU News.
Editor: Kenzo Nakamura

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News