Celebrating three decades of collaboration between RIKEN and RAL

On March 14, Today, an event was held in the UK to celebrate three decades of partnership between RIKEN and the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source, a pulsed neutron and muon source located at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, and to sign a new partnership between the two institutes.

RIKEN and RAL have had a continuous agreement regarding the RIKEN-RAL Muon Facility since 1990. During this period, RIKEN built and operated four muon experimental areas at ISIS and ran a user program which has produced over 500 publications. Under the new agreement focusing on the exchange of young researchers, the RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science and ISIS will continue to maintain a strong partnership to further develop their 30-year collaboration.

Projects conducted at the Facility have included work to detect the signatures of fusion energy (muon-catalyzed fusion) to underpin the science behind the search for generating alternative, clean energy, studies on organic, inorganic, magnetic and superconducting materials, and battery materials as part of a collaboration with Toyota Central R&D Labs., and have made new departures in international collaboration not only between Japan and UK but also involving South East Asian counties such as Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand.

The ceremony was attended by RIKEN Executive Director Shigeo Koyasu, Alan Patridge, Executive Director of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and Director of RAL, Roger Eccleston, Director of the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source, Andrew Taylor, former STFC Executive Director for National Laboratories, and representatives of the Embassy of Japan in the UK and the London Research Liaison Center of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), along with many others involved with the RIKEN-RAL muon facility.

Philip King, Director of the RIKEN office at RAL and Associate Director at the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source, said, “The RIKEN-RAL partnership has been one of the largest, longest-lasting, and most successful UK-Japan science partnerships. For over 30 years RIKEN and ISIS have been collaborating in a wide range of science using muons – fundamental studies, condensed matter and chemical physics investigations, and applied research such as battery materials. While this event marks the end of an era in some respects, RIKEN and ISIS will continue to collaborate in areas of mutual interest with ISIS, welcoming Japanese users to the facility as before."

Left: Dr. Hiroyoshi Sakurai, Director of RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science, Right: Dr. Roger Eccleston, Director of the Intense Pulsed Proton Experimental Station (ISIS) at STFC