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Overseas Facilities Helped Stranded Researchers to Carry Out Suspended Experiments due to the 2011 East Japan Earthquake

4 Oct, 2011

In the aftermath of the 2011 East Japan Earthquake that occurred on March 11, the Materials and Life Science Experimental Facility (MLF) at the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex (J-PARC) was forced to suspend scheduled experiments. Experiments scheduled to be conducted during this suspension period have been accepted and are being performed by several domestic and overseas research facilities.

Twenty-four experiments that were originally scheduled to be conducted at MLF have been accepted by the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (USA). Of these, two neutron reflectivity experiments were conducted using the SNS liquids reflectometer (BL4B). Two independent experimental groups, one led by Prof. Yokoyama (the University of Tokyo) and the other led by Prof. Kanno (Tokyo Institute of Technology), performed these two experiments between August 31 and September 4, 2011. Dr. Yamada (Institute of Materials Structure Science, KEK) provided technical support for these experiments. Dr. Yamada acknowledged: “I would like to thank SNS staff members who supported us. We were able to complete our experiments as scheduled with their cooperation.” In addition to SNS, suspended experiments are scheduled to be performed at other facilities including the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (UK) and Los Alamos National Laboratory (USA) in the future.