Prof. Uemura of Columbia University reports on his Tour-Workshop Symposium in Japan Partially Supported by FUTI

In January of 2017, we organized a 5 day event of consecutive Tour-Workshop-Symposium in Japan, based on financial supports from the FUTI, Japan Atomic Energy Agency and the US NSF. For the flyer of this event please click here. This event was joined by 13 graduate students from Columbia, 2 from Harvard, 1 from U Oregon Eugene, 1 from Rice, 1 from UCLA, 1 from McMaster (Canada), 2 from IOP Beijing, and 1 from Zhejiang (China), from abroad. From Japan, we had about 10 graduate students from the University of Tokyo and 4 from RIKEN (originally from Indonesia). The first event was a tour to experimental facilities at JPARC, Japan’s largest accelerator facility in Tokai Mura, Ibaraki on Jan 13, to which most of the grad students joined. The dinner party photo shows grad students from the US, Canada, China and Japan getting together after the tour of neutron scattering, muon spin relaxation and particle physics facilities of JPARC, following presentations given by the former and current directors of JPARC. On Jan 14-16, we had a three day Workshop on Correlated Electron Physics and Spintronics at Tokai joined by about 60 senior scientists and 40 graduate students. On Jan 17, we organized a one-day Symposium on Mott transitions in the University of Tokyo , having distinguished lecturers, including Prof. Yoshinori Tokura of the University of Tokyo and RIKEN and Yoshiteru Maeno of Kyoto University, both of whom are considered to be the leading contenders for Nobel Prize in the area of solid state physics from Japan, and Prof. Qikun Xue who just received the so-called Chinese Nobel Prize (Frontiers Science Prize) from China on his major discovery of Quantum Anomalous Hall Effect. About 30 grad students presented posters on their research in this Symposium. Graduate student participants from the University of Tokyo included several students: Koshiishi, Sakamoto, Shibata and Takenaka, who visited TRIUMF in Vancouver and Paul Scherrer Institute in Zurich in the past to collaborate on muon experiment with the Columbia group led by Uemura, supported partly by previous funds from FUTI. The January event in Japan made an opportunity for these UTokyo students to be re-united with American and Canadian students with whom they collaborated on researches of solid state physics using high-intensity accelerator facilities in Canada and Switzerland. We very much appreciate generous and continuous support from FUTI which allowed this unique international collaboration and workshop involving graduate students from Columbia, UTokyo and several other institutions from the US, Japan, China and Canada. We are planning to extend these activities to Europe in the Fall 2017 semester, since I obtained a Visiting Professorship at Ecole Polytechnique in Paris to stay for several months and to organize a graduate lecture course gathering motivated graduate students from several French institutions around Paris. Author: Yasutomo Uemura, Professor of Physics, Columbia University


Articles in this newsletter: