Yoji Totsuka has passed away

From Interactions.org, July 10, 2008

Yoji Totsuka

Yoji Totsuka, 66, former director general of KEK, died of a cancer on Thursday, July 10, at a hospital. Yoji began his career at the University of Tokyo in 1972 as a research associate and stayed at DESY on the DASP experiment. In 1981, he joined Prof. Masatoshi Koshiba to build Kamiokande, a large water cerenkov detector which observed neutrinos from a super nova SN1987. In 1988, he led the construction of SuperKamiokande detector, which led him and his colleagues to the discovery of the atmospheric neutrino oscillation.

In October 2002, he moved to KEK and became the director general in April 2003, and worked there for 3 years. He is a professor emeritus of KEK and the University of Tokyo.

He received numerous awards, including the Order of Culture of Japan, the Bruno Pontecorvo Prize in 2004 and the Franklin Institute Awards in 2007.

The funeral service for Yoji Totsuka will take place at Aoyama Funeral Hall in Tokyo at 12:30 p.m. on July 12.

Read an obituary

Physicists discover new particle: The Bottom-most "Bottomonium"

Thirty years ago, particle physics delighted in discovering the "bottomonium" family-the set of particles that contain both a bottom quark and an anti-bottom quark but are bound together with different energies. Ever since, researchers have sought to ascertain the lowest energy state of these tiny yet important particles. Now, for the first time, collaborators on the BaBar experiment at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) have detected and measured the lowest energy particle of the bottomonium family, called the ?b (pronounced eta-sub-b).

"Faced with the end of its run, the BaBar collaboration decided to focus its remaining time on investigating some of the states of bottomonium," said Associate Director of the DOE Office of Science for High Energy Physics Dennis Kovar. "This exciting result achieves one of the principal aims of this final data collection run."

SLAC Director Persis Drell added: "This is a tremendous achievement for both the PEP-II accelerator and the BaBar collaboration. Congratulations to everyone involved."

Every system of matter contains a "ground state"-a lowest energy level to which the system is ever trying to get, shedding energy as it does so. The ground state provides a baseline from which to measure the other more energetic states of the particle, and is key to understanding the fundamental laws that govern how quarks interact and behave.

House Appropriations Bill for Office of Science

From AIP FYI, July 10, 2008

The House Appropriations Committee approved its version of the FY 2009 Energy and Water Development Appropriations Bill on June 25. Traditionally, the final copy of the committee's report would have been made available within a few days. For unknown reasons, the committee's report has not yet been officially published.

The following are selections from an unnumbered, undated report that was made available on the day that the full committee approved by voice vote its version of its yet unnumbered draft bill. The below language should be very close to that approved by the committee, although readers should note that these selections were not taken from the "official" version of the report. When that report is made available, a link will be provided to it.

Note that the "current budget" figures include the both the original appropriations bill (enacted last December) as well as the recently-enacted supplemental appropriations bill.

OVERALL OFFICE OF SCIENCE:

The current budget is $4,035.6 million. The Administration's FY 2009 request was $4,722.0 million. The House Appropriations Committee recommended $4,861.7 million, an increase of 20.5 percent or $826.1 million.