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RIKEN iTHES - Kavli IPMU Research Collaboration Agreement
On Dec.4 (Wed.), the signing ceremony for iTHES - IPMU Research
Collaboration Agreement was held at RIKEN. Maki Kawai (RIKEN Executive
Director),
Hitoshi Murayama (IPMU Director), Tetsuo Hatsuda (iTHES Director),
Shigeki Sugimoto (IPMU Project Professor) signed the Agreement in front of
15 participants from iTHES and IPMU. The purpose of this Agreement is to
make extensive efforts to promote research collaborations, to exchange
researchers, and
to hold joint seminars and colloquiums.
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Event Report
Following the above-mentioned signing of the agreement with Kavli IPMU, Univ. of Tokyo, a special lecture was delivered by Prof. Hitoshi Murayama himself, the Director of Kavli IPMU, as iTHES Theoretical Science Colloquium. The occasion drew a record-large audience of about 150, exceeding the capacity of the venue and resulting in a few dozen standing gallery. Prof. Murayama fascinated the audience with his skilled talk entitled "The Quantum Universe." The birth and the composition of our own universe were illustrated in the talk, and especially the role of the "dark matter, " which is an element yet to be discovered, was detailed.
The turnout was also treated with luscious confectioneries specially arranged for the occasion before the talk.
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Person of the Week
Akira Furusaki
Self-introduction
I am a theoretical condensed matter physicist. Condensed matter physics is a branch of physics that studies various properties of materials from a microscopic law of physics, i.e., quantum mechanics. My recent research is mostly concerned with a new kind of insulators called topologial insulators, in which wave functions of electrons have a nontrivial topological structure. This nontrivial topology leads to metallic electronic states on the surface of a topological insulator. The field of toplogical insulators and topological superconductors is currently one of the hot research areas in condensed matter physics, and several preprints appear every day on the bulletin board arXiv. This is a too crowded field, and perhaps I should move away from it... Besides topological insulators, I am interested in (a) exotic new states of matter that arise from strong electron correlations and (b) effects of disorder on electronic transport. I use both numerical and analytical methods in my research and hope to learn from other members of iTHES new theoretical techniques which I can apply to my problems. Besides physics, I enjoy playing tennis and jogging, which I started about 4 years ago to reduce my body weight. I participated in the half marathon race in Kawagoe last month (1:44:11) and hope to complete my next marathon in less than 4 hours.
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