The 13th WPI Science Symposium, “Expanding the World through Science,” was held at Kyoto University on Saturday, November 16th, 2024.

Eighteen WPI research centers in Japan organize this symposium on an annual rotating basis. This year’s symposium was hosted by the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Biology (WPI-ASHBi), Kyoto University. The symposium began with three scientific talks by WPI researchers, followed by a unique event: a joint poster presentation session by WPI researchers and high school students.

From WPI-QUP, Dr. Ryota Takaku gave a poster presentation. In this presentation, he explained optical elements with moth-eye structures. Its surface is covered with nano-scale pyramidal structure array, which acts as a broadband anti-reflection. He is developing optical elements made of hard materials such as sapphire, alumina, and silicon, with anti-reflective moth-eye structures on both surfaces fabricated with ultra-short pulsed laser ablation. His optical elements achieve low reflection across broadband frequency bands at millimeter and sub-millimeter wavelength, which can help us to probe the cosmic inflation theory by detecting the polarization of the cosmic microwave background.

Fig. 1.1　Dr. Takaku explained his poster to the participants

WPI-QUP also exhibited a booth for outreach. At the booth, we showed a prototype of an optical element with moth-eye structures created by Dr. Takaku and a poster explaining one of QUP’s “new eyes”: the transition edge sensor.Many participants visited our poster and booth, which was an excellent opportunity to promote WPI-QUP and our research activities to a broad audience.

Fig. 1.2 Booth of WPI-QUP

Fig. 1.3 The poster of Dr. Takaku

For more information, please visit the 13th WPI Science Symposium page.:
● https://symposium.ashbi.kyoto-u.ac.jp/13th-wpisymposium/