Chairman of Japan Science Foundation to Speak at
Nuclear Physics Workshop on February 24
February 19, 2009
Akito Arima, a world-renowned nuclear physicist, will present a special lecture as part of a workshop gathering scientists from all over the world to compare notes on the structure, properties, and potential of atomic nuclei. His talk will be February 24 at the Joint Institute for Heavy Ion Research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Arima’s distinguished career includes service as president of the University of Tokyo, membership in the House of Councilors in the Japanese national legislature, Japanese Minister of State for Science and Technology, and his current post as Chairman of the Japan Science Foundation and director of its Science Museum.
The day’s events will include dedication of the United States site for the Japan-U.S. Theory Institute for Physics with Exotic Nuclei (JUSTIPEN). This center facilitates collaboration between the two countries in the physics of nuclei. The primary JUSTIPEN location is at the RIKEN Radioactive Isotope Beam Experimental Facility in Wako, near Tokyo, Japan. David Dean, adjunct associate professor of physics at UT, is associate director of the institute. Physics Professor Witold Nazarewicz is a member of the JUSTIPEN governing board.
Following the dedication, workshop participants will have the opportunity to tour Jaguar and EVEREST. Jaguar is number two on the TOP500 Supercomputers list, capable of churning out more than a quadrillion mathematical calculations per second. The Exploratory Visualization Environment for Research in Science and Technology (EVEREST) laboratory is a large-scale venue for data exploration and analysis, with a screen comparable in size to 150 standard computer displays.
The workshop is the third LACM-EFES-JUSTIPEN Workshop, convening February 23 and concluding on the 25th, with two additional days for individual collaborations. Assistant Physics Professor Thomas Papenbrock is the lead organizer of the workshop, which will bring together both theorists and experimentalists with interests in physics of radioactive nuclei, large amplitude collective motion (e.g., fission and fusion), and theoretical approaches related to the universal nuclear energy density functional—a collaboration of physicists, computer scientists and applied mathematicians using high-performance computing to explore the nuclear landscape. The program will cover a number of topics, including computational nuclear structure physics, Gamma ray spectroscopy, and nuclear structure relevant to nuclear astrophysics. More information is available online at: http://www.phy.ornl.gov/theory/papenbro/feb09.htm.
More information on JUSTIPEN is available at: http://www.phys.utk.edu/justipen/
.