How are you doing, folks? Summer is gradually fading away, although the temperature is still going up and down. Take care of your health in this unstable season. Sleep well during the night and discuss well during the day. Today (Sep. 1) is the birthday of Roy Glauber (Nobel Prize in Physics 2005) who is a father of quantum optics and is also well known by his theory of nuclear collisions. Moreover, he is a "Keeper of the Broom" at Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. (This year's ceremony will be held on Sep.18, 2014).

We will have next iTHES colloquim on 16th Tuesday this month. We invite Prof. Yuko Okamoto from Nagoya University. He will give us the lecture entitled "Enhanced sampling techniques for spin and biomolecular simulations." There will be other three short talks presented by iTHES members.

On Aug.8 (Fri.), we had an informal talk on "Autonomous Car" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car ) as a part of our weekly ithes coffee meeting (12:30-) at room 433 in Main research building.

The speaker was Dr. Toshiki Kindo (Grand Master, BR Intelligent Vehicle Development Dept.,TOYOTA Motor Corporation) who received PhD in theoretical nuclear physics and is now leading the autonomous car development in TOYOTA. He talked about the history and status of the autonomous car, and also how the research group is managed in TOYOTA company. The room was filled by more than 40 theorists, and the discussions/questions continued until 3 pm with coffee + cookies brought from Osaka and Okinawa.

On 25-27 August, we had a meeting on supernova explosions and gamma-ray bursts, supported by iTHES. The meeting was very successful and fruitful, which was more than our expectation. More than 50 people participated in the meeting and enjoyed 16 invited talks, 10 keynote talks, and 9 contributed talks as well chatting & discussions. We confirmed that the quality of researches in Japan in this field is quite high. In fact, we are sure that lots of the invited talks and key note talks during the workshop can be outstanding, invited talks even in international conferences in the world. We also confirmed that we have lots of common interests, and agreed to keep in touch. This is not only for future collaborations but also just for enjoying common interests in science together, which should bring our community in this field more active and successful. The presentation files in this meeting will be uploaded soon here:
http://nagataki-lab.riken.jp/workshop/program_SNGRB2014.html

I am Tomoya Takiwaki. Since my last name is not so familiar in Japan, you can easily find my paper in arXiv and spires. I am a member of Astrophysical Big-bang Laboratory and working on the field of supernovae. I finished my Ph.D in the University of Tokyo where I worked under the supervision of Katsuhiko Sato, who is one of the proposers of Big-bang theory. Before I moved to RIKEN, I had been working in the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan for about 5 years.

My main research interest is the explosion mechanism of supernovae that is long-lasting puzzle since 50 years ago. It's difficult to propose successful supernova explosion model due to the following reason. In the iron core of massive stars, nuclei are changed to uniform nuclear matter by the compression of gravitational force. The hot plasma produced by the phase transition are cooled by photo-dissociation of accreting iron and cannot escape due to large pressure of them.

Additional heating of high energy neutrinos is a promising candidate to push the plasma outward. But it's very tough work to solve transport equation of neutrino in such a dense environment even with utilization of super-computers. Recently we are able to find an explosion model due to the emergence of P flops machine like K-computer. We, however, found the explosion condition is very sensitive to the input physics and the numerical methods. Our achievement might be the first step and we have to sophisticate our methods. That is the reason why I came to RIKEN. I need much help from the nuclear physicists here.

I am very enjoying the atmosphere of iTHES. Many kinds of intelligence are mixed and stimulate my brain. That enlarges my interest. I like computation, mathematics (especially beautiful theorem in geometry) besides the high energy physics. I am looking forward to discussing with you. For the issue on the brain, everything is so fine, the problem is on my body side. I have to do diet to lose weight :-)