Zoom into Research

Taisei Iwagaki joined the ISS2024 (International Symposium on Superconductivity) at Kanazawa, presenting the characterization of the rotational instability of the rotation mechanism.

Yusuke Takase from Okayama University visited IPMU for two weeks again.

Takumi participated 25th Millimeter and Submillimeter Receiver Workshop at Fukui, presenting the construction of the millimeter wave transmittance measurement system at a low temperature for CMB polarization observation.

Another LEGO day hosted by CD3! We have 

7° scale CMB made by Jia! Very impressive!

Also, we got LiteBIRD too. It's under reformation! 

Yuya Nagano from Okayama University visited IPMU. He has been working on beam systematics for LiteBIRD, and he discussed it with Guillaume. We hope will serve as valuable inspiration for future studies. We also organized a lab tour to introduce the HWP and its rotation mechanism. 

We had an annual Kashiwa open campus and hosted the visitors at Lab-B in Kavli IPMU. We had a great time with many visitors and various questions. About 3000 people were visiting Kavli IPMU, and the photo shows the heroic moment of the students, the postdocs, the admin staff, and the faculty explaining to the visitors. 

Many of us have participated in COSMO2024 at Kyoto. Amazingly, 500 cosmologists are getting together for this conference from all over the world. Elisa was one of the SOCs, and it was amazing to organize such a big conference.

Kyoto Univ. is a bit away from the central Kyoto station. When the weather is good, it is a lovely walk along the Kamogawa River.

Dr. Marta Monelli from MPA has arrived at Kavli IPMU as a postdoc. We hope to work with you in this coming years!

The power of iPhone 15! A three-second exposure shot pointing to nowhere in the sky results in the image of a faint Tsuchinshan-ATLAS comet!

Yusuke Takase from Okayama University visited IPMU for two weeks. He has been working on the scanning strategy for LiteBIRD. During his visit, we discussed systematic effects induced by the HWP and a mitigation technique based on spin-based mapmaking. He also led a hands-on session for students on systematics simulations, through which we learned the workflow of these simulations. These discussions inspired us with new research ideas, and we look forward to continuing our collaborative studies! 

Please see a blog of Ishino-lab, Okayama Univ.

Patricia Diego from MPA will be visiting IPMU for a month with the CMB-Inflate program. It will be fun! 

Guillaume Patanchon has arrived at Kavli IPMU via ILANCE. He will be working with our group for a year. It will be a great opportunity to collaborate on various projects, including the studies on HWP systematic effects. We hope he enjoys his time in Japan! 

We students presented our research progress at the 79th annual JPS meeting. Taisei and Takumi gave great presentations, especially considering it was their first time attending the conference! We participated in the 'CMB session,' and many of the presentation topics gave us new ideas that could lead to potential collaborations. Also we enjoyed sightseeing and food in Hokkaido.

Tomo visited CNES and IRAP in Toulouse and IJCLab in Paris. There were many discussions on various fronts, and the collaboration moved forward even more united than before. The photos were taken on the way from IJCLab to a hotel via Parc de Sceaux in Paris. The trip is always full of work, but it is nice to find the time to relax. 

Ryosuke presented our recent study on the rotation mechanism using SMB at ASC2024. This was his first oral presentation at an international conference. It was great to meet many people and discuss new techniques, not only on levitation, but also on TES, KIDs, read-out systems, and material/mechanical properties. These interesting topics inspired us with new research ideas!

Eiichiro gave us a talk about the legacy value and importance of LiteBIRD. He told us not only scientific importance, but also enthusiastically conveyed how exciting it is. 

Eiichiro, the MPA director and senior fellow at IPMU has visited IPMU for a month. It is always great having him!

Taisei, Takumi, Kosuke, and Ryosuke participated in the 54th Summer School on Astronomy and Astrophysics in Kashiko-jima, Mie Prefecture. The sessions and accommodations were held at the same venue that hosted the 42nd G7 summit.

Taisei and Takumi gave their first oral presentations as graduate students, and Ryosuke chaired a session on instrumentation. It was a fantastic opportunity to meet many students working across a wide range of wavelengths, such as X-rays, gamma rays, and millimeter waves. It was also a lot of fun reconnecting with old friends and meeting new ones. The friendships we’ve built will deepen as we advance through our graduate programs. 

Kosuke, Ryosuke, Clément, Toshiya, and Tomo  participated the LiteBIRD face-to-face meeting, hosted by the team in UBC at Vancouver, Canada. Great people, great weather, and great city. We discussed a lot about many ongoing challenges and it was very impressive to see how the team comes together as one! 

Welcome to Jun! We are looking forward to working with you closely!

We hosted the LiteBIRD HWP hands-on at IPMU. The world experts on HWP hardware, HWP simulation, pipeline propagation, millimeter-wave verification at component and system level, and cryogenic modulator and detector were all gathered in the same room, and we discussed various challenges from many directions. It was a casual and constructive meeting. 

Not just technical aspects, we surely talked about many other things at our usual place, Yokocho :-) Thank you all for spending time with us at IPMU after the intense SPIE week.

In parallel, from June 24-28, there were other hands-on running at KEK, and some of us joined. 

Rex from UMN visited Kavli IPMU, and Ryota/Kosuke/Tomo et al. welcomed him. Ryota gave him a lab tour. It is amazing to realize that it has already been 5-6 months since we traveled to UMN in Jan. and Feb.. We hope the TeamAR can get together more often for further acceleration of the collaboration including VRR!  

Dr. Josquin Errard from APC in Paris, our collaborator in LiteBIRD and SO and the "supervisor" for Clément and Baptiste, successfully completed his Habilitation a Diriger des Recherches. Many congratulations! 

The third picture in NYTimes, the front view of the SO-SAT, shows the face-on picture of the forebaffle, which was designed and shipped from IPMU. It started with Fred, Nobu, Shunsuke, and Yuki et al. as the IPMU SO team. Later on, we picked up, and Asuka fully designed this second forebaffle, a segmented design for easier shipping and storage. After the construction, we went through the intensive bad smell gluing at B031 with students from Hongo, breaking big wood shipping boxes, and it was repacked to the international shipping to export to Chile with tremendous paperwork led by the great effort of the IPMU admin. It’s just a piece of metal as a part of the CMB experiment, but it was realized by the full effort of all of us. 

Aya from the IPMU press office initiated the art exhibition at IPMU this Friday evening with wine and cheese. The key word is "connections" this year, and we contributed several pictures to this exhibition. The picture (left) shows the connections among the theory students, the experimental students, and the IPMU press. Hopefully, this will lead to a new collaboration among them.

Sherry Song from UC Berkeley has arrived at Kavli IPMU as a postdoc. Welcome to the group, and we are looking forward to working with you!

Francesco Piacentini from Rom La Sapienza stopped by IPMU on his way to Tsukuba, where we will have a three-day meeting at KEK for LiteBIRD requirement flow down. We hope he can stop by more than 3 hours next time ;-)

Some leave, some come, and some visit. Ryota is leaving QUP, Taisei, and Takumi are, and Giovanni are leaving for Paris after two weeks, Eugenia is leaving back to Pisa after two months in KEK, and welcome to Florie from SISSA. Finally happy birthday to Tommaso and Kosuke. Many reasons to get together! People were singing Italian songs and were requested to volume down a bit 😅

Elisa invited Camila Novaes from the National Institute for Space Research in Brazil, and she stayed at IPMU for 6 months. It was great to have her and discuss many things! Safe trip back, and I hope you will come back soon again!

Our group meeting, chaired by Toshiya, resumed today. Taisei and Takumi gave their first English presentations to introduce themselves. We now have two more soccer fans! After the two self-introduction talks, Florie Carralot, visiting IPMU for one month from SISSA, gave a status report about her gain systematic effect study. Welcome to IPMU! It was an excellent summary!

We, students, went to Kashiwa-no-ha Park, which is located next to our campus, for Hanami. We enjoyed seeing the full bloom of sakura with some snacks. What's more, we played casual game of "Petanque", where the main object is to throw metal balls as close as possible to a small target ball. To our surprise, some of us turned out to be quite skilled at Petanque! It was a lot of fun !

We went to Yokocho for many good reasons. We were triggered by Gilberto's birthday in Japan, thanks to Hans-Kristian and Ingunn visiting Japan, welcome to the graduate school to Taisei, welcome back to Japan to Tommaso, celebrating Jess's six months in Japan, the successful survival of the first-year master program for Kosuke and Ryosuke, and (sorry that we took this picture after you left, but) Satsuki is visiting Germany for four months of collaborative research!  

Thanks to the CMB-Inflate, Hans-Kristian, Ingunn, and Duncan visited IPMU for a few days from Oslo. It was great to learn and discuss the progress from their BeyondPlanck and Cosmoglobe programs.

Taisei Iwagaki and Takumi Izawa are now joining us at Kavli IPMU CMB group via The Department of Physics at the University of Tokyo. 

Ryota Takaku and Hideki Tanimura are now leaving IPMU for the next career step! Best luck to both of you!

Kosuke and Ryosuke presented their research progress at the JPS online spring meeting. Ryosuke ended up calling in from Rome. Both did great presentations! 

We had many reasons to celebrate. The Ryota U.'s last day at IPMU and he is heading with the prestigious industry position, Jun has happily retired his company after working for many many years, Ryota T. is now heading to QUP after 7 years working with us, welcome for Gilberto to Japan, and welcome for Taisei to the graduate school at IPMU.

Gilbert gave a review about the Kalman filter, which is to be used for our encoder data process. 

Ryota Uematsu kindly gave the summary of his Master thesis work. It's all about the LED and PD with the temperature and radiative dependence. We've learned a lot! Your encoder will measure the orientation of the CMB polarization in the future! Thank you!

Ryota Uematsu from Okayama Univ. is visiting IPMU and tell us his master thesis work on the detailed characterization of encoder LEDs and photodiodes! Happy Ryota U. with Ryota T., Ryosuke, and Taisei in the IPMU Lab-B.

Gilberto, Kosuke, and Ryosuke presented their research status and progress at the 13th JSPS Core-to-core program at Epochal Tsukuba focusing on CMB Japan group seminar for young scientists. Great works! 

It was the last day for Hideki. It has been great days to work with Hideki. We always had big laugh. We wish all the best in the next step! The picture is from our home ground table Yokocho, in front of Ageage-tei. We will miss you!   

Shawn was visiting KEK and he is so kind stopping by IPMU on his way back to the airport. Despite the fact that it was such a short time, we exchanged a lot with common challenges. Safe trip back!

Gilberto from Univ. of Rome is now visiting IPMU with the support of CMB-Inflate. We will work together for next two months. Welcome to IPMU!

Takumi, a prospective graduate student working with us for his bachelor degree at TSU together, successfully finished his defense. Congratulations! Now he is ready for a graduate school!

Arianna, Magdy, Simon, Ema from APC are visiting to IPMU! Wecome to IPMU and looking forward to discuss many fronts!

We have a once-a-year type snow today covering up the campus. If you visited IPMU in the past, you can see the different view in this photo! 

Jo has visited IPMU on this snowy day. She gave a wonderful talk! I hope you can come back soon again!