【Nobel Week, Day 4】 Visiting the Nobel Museum

Date of activity: December 6, 2015

Under a cloudy sky and with a high temperature of 11 degrees Celsius, Professor Kajita and his family and guests set out for the Nobel Museum on this warm Sunday morning.

The Nobel Museum, which opened in 2001 and is located in the historic town area of Stockholm, is where the 2015 Nobel Prize recipients and their families all met each other for the first time. Also, it has become tradition for Nobel Prize winners to donate items related to their research to the Museum.

As his contribution, Professor Kajita presented the Museum with photomultiplier tubes from the inner and outer detectors of the Super-Kamiokande facility. The Nobel Museum had already been donated a photomultiplier tube from the Kamiokande facility by UTokyo Professor Emeritus and Nobel Laureate Masatoshi Koshiba in 2002. Photomultiplier tubes are sensors that detect light within Kamiokande and Super-Kamiokande, and are the most important components used in the Super-Kamiokande experiments.

Professor Kajita also signed his name along with the phrase "Super-Kamiokande collaboration" in white on the bottom of a black chair in the Bistro Nobel, a restaurant within the Museum. His signature joins the others of past Nobel Laureates who have signed their names on the restaurant's chairs. At a press conference held in the afternoon, Professor Kajita said, "I wrote 'Super-Kamiokande' along with my name because I wasn't the only one involved; the research and experiments were conducted as part of an international collaboration."

<Related Links>
 Nobel Museum
 Photo-Multiplier-Tubes
 Professor Takaaki Kajita donates two types of photomultiplier tubes to the Nobel Museum

*【Nobel Week】 is a special series of reports given during the Nobel Week.
*You can read articles about the other Nobel Week activites here: http://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/general/nobel_index.html