Happy New Year to Everyone!
This is my final new year's message as the Director General of KEK. I would
like to take this opportunity, therefore, to present my general views on
the state of science as related to KEK activities and to touch briefly
on KEK activities from that view point.
First of all, I should point out that increasingly intensive efforts have
been made in many places, including our photon factory, to determine the
structure and the biological function of proteins. As we all know, there
are a huge number of different kinds of proteins with a variety of geometrical
and topological structures and with various biological and chemical functions,
thus making a living body such a complex system.
Amazingly enough, all these three dimensional structures, however, are
encoded in one dimensional DNA with only four letters A, T, C and G, just
as all the information of black holes are encoded on their two dimensional
surfaces. I do not know if this holographic view will help us to understand
the role and the structure of protein, but one thing seems to be getting
clearer: there must be a set of simple rules (which could be called the
laws of biophysics) to determine the complex structure of a living body,
although its relation, if any, to self-automaton still remains to be seen.
It is clear that meticulous investigation and very hard work are necessary
for us to reach any understanding of all these issues.
Our photon factory has been and will continue to be one of the major centers
of these research activities. Having said all this, I do not wish to ignore
any of the other activities in the photon factory. Take, for example, the
issue of strongly correlated electron systems. Have we understood all aspects
of this issue? Well, yes, if you think that the Heisenberg model is the
solution to ferromagnetism, but, surely, it was just the beginning. We
have seen many interesting activities in this area, both in the photon
factory and in our neutron facility and also in the muon facility (unique
activity of muon facility is the pride of KEK).
This brings me to the second topic I would like to address: the neutron
facility. The next few years will be a crucial time for the Japanese neutron
scattering community, scientifically, technically and also organizationally.
Is there any way we can improve the quality of the neutron beam to match
the demand of protein crystallography? Less crucially, but still non-trivially,
what is the best target and what is the best beam: proton or heavy ions?
The organizational issue is the following: is it more important to combine
the activities using reactor neutrons with those utilizing the accelerator
neutrons than to integrate the KEK neutron activities into much wider activities
of materials science? The organizational issues must be solved within the
neutron community with its appropriate leadership. KEK must make the utmost
effort to help them reach the right decision. Here, of course, I am talking
about the organizational structure of High Intensity Proton Accelerator
project when it will be completed. The project is progressing, although
I would not say "very smoothly". One thing I regret most about
this project is that I seem to have accepted the policy of settling the
neutrino experiment in the second stage. I have been making an effort to
remedy this situation after the decision was made, but so far without substantial
success. This will surely keep haunting me until it becomes a reality.
What is the status of high energy physics in general? With the long baseline
and other neutrino experiments, along with the output from the B-factories,
we are beginning to get a complete set of data on quark-lepton masses and
mixings. What are we going to do with these data? We certainly believe
that all these originate in Higgs couplings to leptons and quarks. The
next step, therefore, is to prove this. One of the objectives of the Linear
Collider project is to prove it to a good accuracy.
After proving this in a decade or two we can ask a further question: so
what? Let me subdivide this theoretical question into several pieces.
- Are the Higgs interactions in any way related to gauge interactions presumably in a space of extra-dimensions?
- Are the Higgs and quarks and leptons parts of a big supermultiplet which also contains gauge particles as superstring theory suggests?
- If the origin of symmetry and its breaking lie in the geometry and the topology of the space of extra-dimensions, is it not unreasonable to presume that the usual standard model symmetry breaking is somehow exceptional?
Potentially, the last question could be investigated when the new Linear
Collider gets higher energy and higher intensity, so that it can fully
study the self-couplings of Higgs bosons. I am not trying to confuse you
by asking these rather theoretical questions; I merely want to point out
that the LC project is needed if humankind is destined to understand Mother
Nature. Who and where shall we build the LC?
One possibility, of course, is to build it in the most powerful country on earth, the United States.
However, the U.S. particle physics community is divided, unfortunately;
the east coast group extends eastward beyond the Atlantic Ocean and the
west coast group extends westward beyond the Pacific Ocean. I believe the
U.S. can take leadership only when the East moves westwards, the West moves
eastwards, and they thus get unified. This may be the time when the Asia-Pacific
countries show the world that they can get together and contribute to the
advancement of fundamental science. I must point out, though, that whoever
takes the leadership the LC project itself must be global.
In just three months you will see the new KEK management, with fresh ideas
and brand new approaches. It will be exposed to a new environment quite
different from the one to which we were given 15 years ago. For example,
more and more demands will come from the industrial sector to the basic
science sector, seeking its applications. I believe KEK can be an excellent
role model for the collaboration of industry and basic science. In fact,
I still believe that physics can change the whole world of the 21st century,
just as it did in the last century. For this to happen, all sorts of technologies
we are developing at KEK, such as superconducting technology, conventional
accelerator technology, an exotic way of accelerating particles, global
accelerator networking, collaboratory technology, etc, all will play a
key role. Therefore, they should be advanced much, much further, of course,
in ever expanding international collaboration.
Thank you.
| Hirotaka Sugawara |
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| KEK Director General |
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