Research

I am Hiroshi Okamoto, a researcher working at the Department of Intelligent Mechatronics (formerly Department of Electronics and Information Systems) of Akita Prefectural University, located in a beautiful northern part of Japan.

I am a member of the Control Engineering Lab, with Profs. Li Xu, Shin-ya Matsushita and grad/undergrad students.

I have always been fascinated by quantum physics and biology, though perhaps this is an odd combination. Our current projects include development of a low-dose transmission electron microscope that is specifically tailored for radiation-sensitive biological specimens. Our approach is to exploit the so-called 'quantum weirdness' to amplify the weak signal, using a single-electron device. This is admittedly a long shot and at present we develop just one necessary technique for that:

An electron mirror that is sensitive enough to detect a single elementary charge on the mirror surface.

Update (May 2014): I now think that flux qubits are more practical. Please see the Publications page.

My 'official' profile is HERE, though it is only in Japanese. Briefly, I got my Ph. D. at the Tokyo Institute of Technology for my experimental research on superconducting single electron transistors. Since then, I have worked in fields such as surface science, biophysics, micro-energy harvesting - in Tsukuba, Boston, Zurich, Sendai, and now in Akita.

Student's research

Shown above are photos of our instruments under development. A number of bachelor/master students contributed to the project. I note two master students in particular: Yuki Okuda and Yukihiro Takayama. Shigeo Miura fabricated many mechanical parts.

Update (Jan 2020):

Yukihiro Takayama won an award from the 12th Asia-Pacific Microscopy Conference!

This is the first prize regarding our "quantum electron microscopy" project (hopefully not the last)!

While my passion lies in biological electron microscopy and I would invite everyone to join me, my students are also encouraged to pursue their own interests if they have one. Some are trying to make a brain-computer-interface to a robot, which they hope to control just by thinking... Stay tuned!

Past research & skills (Okamoto)

Update (June 2020): I failed to participate in #ShutDownSTEM #Strike4BlackLives that went on worldwide. Here I only note that I worked on the electret in the past. One of the key figures in electret technology is Dr. James Edward Maceo West.

I have spent most of my career building scientific instruments. I am familiar with very low temperature, ultrahigh vacuum probe microscopy, microfabrication, etc. These days I increasingly spend time on theoretical work also, but from time to time I turn lathe, solder wires, write a few lines of codes...

This is a home-built dilution refrigerator used in my thesis study on single electron devices at around 1995. The gas handling system is built by Hirokazu Tokuda. We modified a low-cost SEM to do e-beam lithography (see the ugly device!).

This is a helium-temperature ultrahigh vacuum dual-tip STM that I built in Dongmin Chen's lab. Technical staffs made a lot of high-precision parts and control electronics for us.