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January 4, 2001 |
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Hirotaka Sugawara |
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Director General of KEK |
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KEK staffs and users, colleagues and friends
all over the world, I wish you a happy new
century.
We had a very productive year
at the end of the last century.
B-factory started its real thing - physics
run. BELLE group has collected substantial
data although it is far from its goal of
300 1/fb yet. To speed up the rate of the
data collection, we certainly need to increase
the luminosity, and for this purpose, much
more machine studies and the understanding
of the beam properties are required. This
should be one of the top priority jobs.
Time-sharing between the machine studies
and the physics run must be carefully decided.
K2K is providing us exciting data, although
the statistics is still far from sufficient
to say anything conclusive. I hope we will
get more confidence in the physics this year.
The Photon factory, neutron facility and
the meson facility also had a very productive
year in 2000.
Rather than touching many subjects out of
several hundreds, let me tell you an episode
of one user of our radiation facility who
happened to be a famous otolaryngologist
and an opera singer --
Professor Harada who is also the president
of the Hiroshima University. When he came
to KEK as a photon factory user towards the
end of last year, I invited him to my office
to have a chat.
I wanted to discuss the issue
of the reform of university system with him,
but I found that he was so excited about
his discoveries and about what he and his
team were doing at the photon factory that
he started explaining to me rather than listening
to what I wanted to say.
It was about the tiny organ in
bird's head, called lagena. He started explaining
to me enthusiastically how he found some
magnetic substance such as iron or manganese
in this tiny extremity and how he came to
an idea of solving the longstanding issue
of how birds and fish navigate themselves
back to their birth place using the earth's
magnetic field.
While he was explaining to me
lots of details about this very interesting
subject and while I was trying in vain to
insert a few words on the university system,
a telephone rang in my secretary's office.
It was for Professor Harada. He rushed to
the phone and looked very very excited. Then
he came back to my office and said "We
found it. It's going to be great."
I asked him rather hesitantly "What
did you find?".
He answered "We found manganese in the
lagena of spot-billed duck. This is a solid
evidence of the role of lagena in the detection
of the earth magnetic field ."
I congratulated him and quickly
handed him a note on my thought about the
university system so that he can read it
some time later when he is less excited.
I liked him very much and envied
him a bit for such a devotion to science
even when he is a president of a big university.
I understood that he and his
coworkers used the micro-beam technology
to detect a minute quantity of the substance
at Dr.Iida's beam line. I still do not have
a chance to talk to Dr.Iida, but I hope to
have it soon.
There must have been a lot of
episodes like this and I hope some day some
appropriate person will write a book about
them.
Now back to the status of KEK.
We are happy to announce that
the JHF project, now combined with the JAERI
neutron project, was approved by the government
and the construction will start in fiscal
year 2001 as a flagship project of merging
of STA and Monbusho. Its first stage is the
1300 oku yen project and this includes the
3GeV and 50GeV machines. Dr.Nagamiya will
be the project leader and they will be built
in the JAERI site. We are currently discussing
the management structure of the project.
I know it is not going to be an easy job
for anyone involved, but we are determined
to solve all the problems that would occur
in this kind of joint projects in the name
of science.
We must also re-arrange the structure of
KEK, especially the structure of accelerator
division that will be lead by Dr. Kamiya,
starting April 2001, so that we can cope
with the future of the laboratory.
Let me describe, at this time,
my own thought about our most tantalizing
project - JLC.
In 1986, the High Energy Committee
chaired by Professor Kajikawa of Nagoya University
decided on the following guidelines for the
future of Japanese high energy physics.
1. We must immediately start R&D work
to construct a TeV-scale linear collider
on the Japanese soil.
2. We will participate in the SSC.
These guide lines were revised in 1997, but
the basic change was simply to replace the
SSC with the LHC.
It was also noted that, although we will
take the leadership in the linear collider
project, it should be open to the world community.
The organization to execute the project was
suggested to be formed soon.
Since then, the R&D studies have been
going on up until now, both in X and C-band
technologies, the X-band being the main and
the C-band as the back-up technology.
The Office of Promotion for JLC was created
with Dr. Iwata as its head. During this period
the ACFA was formed to promote the accelerator-related
sciences in Asia.
Its activities turned out to be quite fruitful.
Now that JHF was finally approved, I think
the time is ripe enough to go one step further
for the realization of JLC.
I would like to take the following measures.
| 1. |
I myself will take lead the Office of the
Promotion of JLC. This structure will
be succeeded by the following director
generals of KEK as well. |
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| 2. |
The structure of this office must be decided
in the next three months before the beginning
of fiscal year 2001.
It obviously should include accelerator and
physics branches both of which must be headed
by relatively young and active leaders. |
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| 3. |
The office personnel must include non-Japanese
members especially some Asians and people
from neighboring countries. |
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Following considerations stem from the recently
approved "Second Fundamental Project
of Science and Technology" which amounts
to 24 trillion yen in the next 5 years. The
section 1 of chapter 2 of this document stresses
the importance of life science and the section
3 mentions that Japan needs to propose international
projects and it must strengthen its partnership
with Asian countries in pursuit for such
projects.
Following this general governmental policy,
I would like to take the
following steps.
| 4. |
I would like to ask the chairman of ACFA
to form a LC assessment committee to compare
not just the X and C technologies but all
the available LC technologies. The actual
assessment should start after year 2002. |
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| 5. |
I would like to ask our interested Asian
colleagues to name both LC-physics and LC-accelerator
leaders of their countries. We must work
closely with them to get the industries of
their countries to be
interested and to be involved in the project.
The way of technology transfer to these industries
must be sought out and the serious cost estimate
should start at a certain stage. |
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| 6. |
We must prove to the structure biologists
and the biologists in general that the fourth
generation radiation facility is a useful
one for them.
For this purpose, ATF must be utilized to
construct the actual X-ray
sources to perform the x-ray crystalography.
The relation between the body to execute
this project and the office of promotion
for JLC must be clearly defined. |
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Lastly, I would like to make somewhat philosophical
remarks.
So far, you might have felt that I am now
leaning towards an Asian
regionalism attitude rather than the globalism
which I have been stressing in the past.
That is not quite the case. I have been and
I am consistently against regionalism. I
would like to point out that one of the supreme
forms of regionalism is the one that blindly
associates the modern science and technology
with what is called the Western culture.
I am here to challenge such forms of regionalism.
As long as "Japan's technological power
is represented by American and European media
as a threat to the Western modernity, to
the notion of Western superiority, and to
the very boundary that has stood between
the 'premodern-East' and the 'modern-West'
" (quoted from "Transnational Genomic"
by Joan.H.Fujimura in "doing Science+Culture",
edited by R.Reid and S.Traweek, Routledge,
2000), my challenge must continue. And, to
prove that we are not exchanging a regionalism
with another regionalism, we
should make our best effort to bring the
project into a genuine global project. We,
therefore, will continue to work with SLAC
on R&D and continue to keep exchanging
the information with DESY.
As the 1986 and 1997 guidelines of the High
Energy Physics Committee stated, we should
take the leadership and together we shall
do so. Thank you. |
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