HyperK WP 2,6 (OD)
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Oxford
Department Name: Oxford Physics
Abstract
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People |
ORCID iD |
| Dave Wark (Principal Investigator) |
| Description | Hyper Kamiokande Experiment |
| Organisation | University of Tokyo |
| Country | Japan |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | I am using this section to describe the somewhat unusual outcome of this particular grant. The grant, ST/X002462/1, HyperK WP 2,6 (OD), was part of the larger Hyper Kamiokande grant which funded all the UK activities on the Hyper Kamiokande experiment. This specific part of the grant was to hire a postdoc at Oxford to work on the Hyper Kamiokande OD, however during the period of that grant the STFC had not committed to the UK participating in that particular part of the project. I therefore did not hire the postdoc, and the grant was unused. It might therefore not appear to have any outputs, but that is not true, as the possession of the grant (even unused) kept Oxford involved in Hyper Kamiokande while further negotiations took place. As a consequence of those negotiations the UK has now undertaken a limited role in the OD, and a new grant has been issued by the STFC (our reference is ST/Y005988/1, however ResearchFish does not seem to be able to locate that when I try under "Further Funding") to allow us to hire the postdoc, and a hiring process has started. The postdoc will be involved in the construction of the Hyper Kamiokande OD, and also in the DAQ for Hyper Kamiokande, and will then transition into the exploitation of this massive new detector. |
| Collaborator Contribution | The Hyper Kamiokande collaboration is a broad international collaboration to extend the successful Super Kamiokande and T2K collaborations by building an enormous (roughly twice size of the Albert Hall, a kilometre underground) neutrino detector in western Japan. |
| Impact | The collaboration is involved in the construction of Hyper Kamiokande, which is still not built (hence no outcomes yet). Once built it will be the world's leading astrophysical and long-baseline neutrino detector, with a broad physics programme ranging from CP violation in neutrino oscillations to the most sensitive search for proton decay to the observation of neutrinos from supernovae. The two predecessors of Hyper Kamiokande (Super Kamiokande and Kamiokande) each won a Nobel Prize, which gives some calibration of the importance of the physics topics being addressed, and we have every reason to believe that the impact of the even more sensitive Hyper Kamiokande experiment will be as significant. |