Kunio Inoue
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science announced Kunio Inoue, IPMU principal investigator and professor of Tohoku University, as a recipient of the 2008 JSPS Prize for his contribution on "Precision Measurement of Reactor Neutrino Oscillations".
Neutrinos come in three types (electron-type, muon-type, and tau-type), and a phenomenon of their transitions among different types is called neutrino oscillation. Neutrinos have corresponding antimatter called anti-neutrinos. Kunio Inoue has been a leader of KamLand project for detecting anti-neutrinos generated from the power plant reactors, and succeeding for the first time in the world to detect that the yield of reactor neutrinos varies depending on their energies. This was made possible by building a tank of liquid scintillator highly sensitive for low energy neutrinos, and by pushing the background suppression to the limit. This detector is located in Kamioka mine that has been famous for detecting supernova neutrinos. KamLand experiment measured the neutrino oscillation frequency, which resulted in the world highest precision determination of the mass difference between different types of neutrinos.
His work gave a significant impact to the understanding of fundamental properties of elementary particles. Inoue has also been pioneering the research for detecting neutrinos from inside the earth. We look forward to his future activities.