KEK: Flavoured future

2011 saw a pivotal moment in KEK's history: we endured severe damage and needed a recovery period following the earthquake in March.

The Belle detector being upgraded to the Belle II detector for SuperKEKB.

The Photon Factory, a light source facility used for various kinds of material and life science research, resumed operation in October. This allowed it to continue its many investigations, including the analysis of the asteroid sample returned by the Hayabusa spacecraft.

J-PARC, a high intensity proton accelerator complex, will resume operation of the Materials and Life Science Facility, the Nuclear and Particle Physics Facility and the Neutrino Facility in January 2012.

This was also the year that the KEK B-factory, the world-record holding luminosity collider, began its upgrade to SuperKEKB. The Japanese funding agency MEXT approved the project for 2011 and a groundbreaking ceremony was held in November. The "Roadmap" of the Japanese high-energy physics community, originally established in 2007, describes SuperKEKB as a key project for furthering the investigation of quark flavour CP asymmetries.

The other project in the Roadmap is a beam-power upgrade of J-PARC, needed for various studies including lepton flavour mixing, which may lead to further investigation of CP asymmetry in leptons. Using data obtained before the earthquake, T2K announced an important breakthrough in the measurement of the neutrino mixing angle in June. Next year, the long baseline neutrino experiment T2K, and other types of fixed target experiments at the Hadron Hall and the Muon Facility are expected to accumulate even more data at unprecedented rate.

The roadmap also confirms our commitment to programmes pushing the energy frontier. We support the operation and upgrade of the LHC, as well as increasing efforts to finalise R&D for the International Linear Collider in order to write up the technical design report.

by KEK Public Relations Office