About the Tomonaga Center
Tomonaga Center for the History of the Universe (TCHoU) was founded in October 2017 as a research center at the University of Tsukuba. The mission of the Center is to clarify the genesis of the Universe as well as the origin of matter and life and to construct an integrated view of the History of the Universe, through international and interdisciplinary collaboration of mathematical natural sciences.
Why our Universe was bone and how it developed into the present state? Since its birth at the Big Bang, the Universe has experienced various drastic events. Because the Universe is not a stable object, we have to understand and explain the present state as a consequence of dynamical processes the Universe has experienced. Though many events in the History of the Universe have been clarified, still many pieces are missing to understand our Universe today.
At Tsukuba, five experimental projects in the area of astrophysics, particle physics, and nuclear physics were selected in the Master Plan 2017 of the Science Council of Japan as scientifically important projects to be pushed by the whole community. Three projects, for which the University of Tsukuba is the main institute, are the "Search for the decay from the cosmic neutrino background", the "Study of the quark-gluon plasma phase by high-energy heavy ion collision experiment", and the "Antarctic Astrotelescope Project". Remaining two projects, in which the University of Tsukuba plays a vital role in pushing forward, are the "Heavy-elements science through improvement of RI Beam Factory" and the "Particle experiments by the high-luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC)". Based on close collaborations with the Center for Computational Science (CCS) that pushes forward the "Cosmo-Simulator Project -From the genesis of the Universe to the creation of life-", the Tomonaga Center for the History of the Universe connects these five experimental projects to cast new light on the missing pieces in the History of the Universe.
The Tomonaga Center has the following four research divisions:
- Division of Antarctic Astronomy
- Division of Elementary Particles
- Division of Quark Nuclear Matters
- Division of Photon and Particle Detectors
To promote and accelerate international and interdisciplinary collaborations with CCS and other international institutions, we also have the Office for Integrated Researches.
The name Tomonaga Center is from Dr. Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, the second Nobel Laureate from Japan, who made fundamental contributions in constructing relativistic quantum field theories, the renormalization theory, theory of collective motions, etc. and also a founder of the physics institute at Tsukuba.
Visit Tomonaga Memorial Room, Univ. Tsukuba and Tomonaga Exibition at the University of Tsukuba Gallery for more information about Dr. Tomonaga.
(Photo: Tomonaga Memorial Room)
Tomonaga Center for the History of the Universe was founded in October 2017 based on the Research Core for the History of the Universe and the Laboratory for Development of Photon and Particle Detectors at the Center for Integrated Research in Fundamental Science and Engineering (CiRfSE). See news of 1 Oct 2017 for more details of the reorganization of research centers at the Faculty of Pure and Applied Sciences, Univ. of Tsukuba, at that time.
Research Projects
