Director's Greetings

Highlights in 2014

We are pleased to report our annual activities in 2014 finally.

At the Ring Cyclotron Facility, a systematic study of the low energy super Gamow-Teller states has been carried out. And the so-called “Low-Energy Super GT state (LESGT state)” is found to consume more than half of the Ikeda sum rule values. The drastic change in the location of the GT strength can be understood in relation to the repulsive and attractive nature of isovector and isoscaler effective nuclear interactions. At the EN course, the first experiment by CAGRA (Clover Array Gamma-ray spectrometer at RCNP/RIBF for Advanced research) project has been successfully carried out. The project will provide many physics opportunities at RCNP in the coming few years. The development of the DC-muon beam line (MuSIC-M1) was almost completed. It attracts new ideas and new users not only from physics but also from other fields such as astrophysics and material science.

For the Laser-Electron Photon facility at SPring-8, the first physics run at LEPS2 with BGOegg was launched with strong collaboration with ELPH, Tohoku University. The experiment aims to study the medium modification of the eta-prime meson through a search for the mesic nuclei.

In the theory division, the intensive lattice-QCD study of nuclear and hyperon forces has been carried out. The nuclear forces were determined through the Nambu-Bethe-Salpeter wave functions by a direct use of QCD (HAL-QCD method). The extension of the HAL QCD method made it possible to calculate the parity odd sectors and spin-orbit (LS) force.

There are many other actives and progresses in this online report. I hope you will find them interesting!

Sincerely yours,
Takashi Nakano
Director of Research Center for Nuclear Physics