I was asked from an ithes associate that "what is the goal of iTHES?". I would say there is no definite goal to be set from the beginning. Instead, we should create and solve interesting scientific problems through the discussions among the reserchers with different disciplines.

I would recommeed the people who have similar questions to take a look at the article published in RIKEN news about iTHES. This is in Japanse, but an English digest version (without figures unfortunatelly) can be seen from
http://www.riken.jp/en/pr/topics/2014/20140110_2/

iTHES is a growing concept and it depends very much on your new ideas!!

Tetsuo Hatsuda
iTHES Director

"Movie of Supernova Explositon at 4D Theater"
On 24th June, demonstration of a movie of supernova explosion was performed at 4D Theater in the Information Science Building. It is well known that massive stars explode as supernova explosions, although its explosion mechanism is not understood completely. Super-computing using a sophisticated numerical code is essential to unveil the mechanism. The simulation was done using K-Computer by Dr. Tomoya Takiwaki who will join Astrophysical Big Bang (ABB) Lab. on 1st Aug 2014, and the visualization was done by 4D2U team in National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. On 24th June, the theater was full of audience (about 50 people, including both of researchers and administrative staffs) to see the movie with special glasses. Hiro Nagataki, the PI of ABB lab., presented short introduction on supernova explosion, then showed the movie. ABB lab. would like to improve the simulation as well as the visualization to understand the mechanism of supernova explosion completely and present the results impressively to any people who are interested in Astrophysics & Cosmology.

"iTHES Weelky Coffee Meeting Started"
On 27th June, iTHES Weekly Coffee Meeting started at the large meeting room on the second floor of the Main Cafeteria. Many iTHES members (about 20-30 people) gathered and enjoyed free chatting and discussions. Impressively, discussions using a white board started soon after the beginning of the meeting. We belive that the coffee meeting should help to enhance communications & collaborations among iTHES members. At the first meeting, we talked how we can improve the meeting, and we could hear many helpful ideas for the purpose. We would like to take the ideas into account and improve the meeting so that every participant can enjoy friutful chattings & discussions. For the moment, the coffee meeting will be held every Friday during 12:30-14:00. Next time (4th July) the place is again at the large room on the second floor of the main cafeteria. Please feel free to come and enjoy conversations!

The anual strings conference, Strings2014, was held at Princeton university for the period of 23rd - 27th June, 2014. This time the conference was hosted by really the center of the world as for string theory research --- Institute of Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton and Princeton university. Probably that is one reason why the 2014 conference accommodated more than 600 participants, which is the record among the series of the Strings conferences ever, and another reason is that, in the week prior to the conference, IAS hosted a school program for younger generations.

The Strings conference was successful in the sense that it made new creative ideas to gather, which should create new findings and directions of research. Intriguing part of the conference was that many talks were devoted to not string theory but to related subjects, such as various quantum field theories, scattering amplitudes, quantum entanglement, condensed matter like Kondo effect and superconductors, number theory, and cosmology. Every participant has a feeling that intertwining ideas in different fields is the most interesting and efficient way to create new ideas, and that is along the spirit of iTHES.

Hello, I’m Noriaki Ogawa, a newcomer to Hatsuda Lab. as an SPDR fellow and iTHES associate. I’m a string theorist and my main research topic is gauge/gravity correspondence, while I’m also interested in theoretical biology. I’m working with two other labs of iTHES --- Hashimoto Lab. and Mochizuki Lab., on these topics above respectively.