[Neutron] J-PARC Project Newsletter No.88

[SHIBATA Kaoru]

★☆━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 
　 J-PARC Project Newsletter
　　                       No.88, October 2022                                                                      
Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex under joint operation by the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) and the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA)                                                                               
http://j-parc.jp/index-e.html                                                                              
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━☆★

HEADLINES AND CONTENTS

1. [Overview]

* Impact of the Electricity cost rise on operation period
* KEK Project Implementation Plan (PIP) 2022 released on June 24, 2022
* User’s council held Aug. 1st
* Approval of radiation facility modification finally given by NRA on Aug. 24th, 187 days from the application’s date.
* J-PARC facility open house held fully online on Aug. 27, 2022
* Prof. Ogitsu, director of Cryogenic science center/KEK, and Cryogenic section in J-PARC awarded IEEE CSC “Award for continuing and significant contributions in the Field of Applied Superconductivity”

2. [Accelerator Division]

OPERATION STATUS OF THE ACCELERATORS.

3. [Particle and Nuclear Physics Division]

PROGRAM ADVISORY COMMITTEE MEETING.
DETERMINATION OF THE PAULI REPULSION BETWEEN QUARKS IN THE SIGMA+ P INTERACTION.
TOWARD HIGH-POWER HIGH-PRECISION EXPERIMENT. 
STATUS OF THE COHERENT MUON TO ELECTRON TRANSITION (COMET).
STATUS OF THE MUON G-2/ ELECTRIC DIPOLE MOMENT (EDM) (E34).

4. [Materials and Life Science Division]

SHORTENED OPERATING SCHEDULE IN 2022B PERIOD.
BEAM OPERATION ENDED SUCCESSFULLY AND MAINTENANCE WORKS ARE GOING ON.
PROPOSALS FOR 2022B ROUND WERE APPROVED.
OPERATION OF ALL FOUR MUON BEAMLINES SUCCESSFULLY COMPLETED AND CONSTRUCTION AND MAINTENANCE WORKS IN PROGRESS.

5. [Nuclear Transmutation Division]

WORKSHOP ON J-PARC PROTON BEAM IRRADIATION FACILITY PLAN AND ESTABLISHMENT OF ITS USER COMMUNITY.

6. [Safety Division]

THE APPLICATION FOR A LICENSE OF THE OPERATION WAS GRANTED.

7. [Information]

8. [Editorial Note]


☆━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━…
1. [Overview] by Takashi KOBAYASHI
…━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━★

* Impacts of Electricity cost rise on operation period:
Recently electricity costs are skyrocketing and impacting the operation period in FY2022. Already it was announced that the MLF operation will have to be shortened in the latter half of FY2022 as described in the MLF section in this report. MR user operation will also have to be shortened unless an additional supplemental budget will come. We are carefully watching the electricity price trend.

* KEK Project Implementation Plan (PIP) 2022 released on June 24, 2022
KEK Project Implementation Plan (PIP) is the plan to realize the research projects which includes ones executed by KEK operating budget and the ones which require new funding requests. Taking into account the recommendations from the KEK scientific advisory committee, the KEK PIP 2022 was released on June 24, 2022
https://www.kek.jp/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/KEK-PIP2022.pdf
Among the projects requiring new funding requests, four projects are chosen as high priority. The highest priority is given to the J-PARC Hadron hall extension. The transmission muon microscope at J-PARC MLF is also chosen as one of the four projects.

* User’s council held Aug. 1st 
On Aug. 1st, the first J-PARC user’s council meeting was held in hybrid mode. The committee consists of Japanese representatives from relevant user communities of J-PARC and is chaired by Prof. Toshio Yamaguchi (Fukuoka University). The council was asked to summarize the needs/requests from the user communities and will submit its findings as a document to the J-PARC director.
https://kds.kek.jp/event/43086/ (Slides in Japanese sorry.)

* Approval of radiation facility modifications by NRA was finally given on Aug. 24th, 187days from the application’s date.
 We submitted an application for radiation facility modifications to National Radiation Authority (NRA) on Feb. 16, 2022. The application includes MLF H-line, HD C-line, HD power up, and NU power up. Approval is needed to execute the experimental program as planned after the summer shutdown period. The approval came on Aug. 27, 2022, after 187days from the application’s date. After receiving the NRA approval, we need to get approval from local governments, namely Ibaraki prefecture and Tokai village. The prefecture decided to review this modification by the committee for nuclear-power safety measures. It will be held on Oct. 19. The period to get approval from NRA is getting longer and longer and leads to a serious impact on the J-PARC science program.

* J-PARC facility open house held fully online on Aug. 27, 2022
J-PARC facility open house was held online on Aug. 27. It is the 3rd time it was held online due to the COVID pandemic. Tokai village Mayor Mr. Yamada kindly visited J-PARC and appeared on the video; the J-PARC director Kobayashi interviewed him. The videos were broadcasted through Youtube and niconico douga (Japanese localized streaming video service). The # of viewers was ~1000 and ~9000, respectively. The recorded videos can be watched through https://j-parc.jp/c/OPEN_HOUSE/2022/.
 
* Prof. Toru Ogitsu, Head and Professor of Cryogenics Science Center, Applied Research Laboratory, KEK, and also a cryogenic section member of J-PARC is awarded the IEEE "Award for Continuing and Significant Contributions in the Field of Applied Superconductivity"
https://ieeecsc.org/awards/award-continuing-and-significant-contributions-field-applied-superconductivity
for his long contributions to this field including a major contribution to the T2K experiment. He introduced the idea of a super-conducting combined function (SCCF) magnet for the primary proton transport line of the J-PARC neutrino facility. He and his team succeeded to realize the SCCF beamline on schedule which led to the success of the T2K experiments.


☆━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━…
2. [Accelerator Division] by Michikazu KINSHO
…━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━★

OPERATION STATUS OF THE ACCELERATORS

 The beam operation for the MLF users was completed on Jun 24 as scheduled with high availability (~ 95%). Also, a successful beam circulation in the MR with a new power supply was achieved.
 The beam operation as an operation run of Run#89, which restarted in May, has been continued until July 20th on schedule. The beam operation for the Materials and Life Science experimental facility (MLF) users was completed on Jun 24 as scheduled with high availability (~ 95%). The beam power for the MLF user program was about 830 kW. 
 After the user operation was completed, a continuous beam test at 1 MW beam power was performed for two days at the linac and RCS. Beam tests were also conducted at MR until July 7. During the 1 MW beam test, continuous operation for the scheduled time was not possible due to the outside temperature of 38 degrees Celsius and the failure of one of the RF cavities in the RCS. High-intensity beam operation under such harsh conditions far exceeded the cooling capacity of the cooling water facility of the RCS. 
 However, it was clear that even under these conditions, the beam could be operated stably with a beam power of 600 kW.
 The MR beam test was originally scheduled to start on June 1, but due to a delay in the turning of the main magnet power supply, the beam test could not start until June 27. Therefore, the scheduled beam acceleration test could not be performed, but the beam study at the injection energy of 3 GeV was mostly completed as per the scheduled program for fast extraction. The MR beam acceleration test is rescheduled to be performed in the beam test starting in November.
 The J-PARC accelerator facilities are scheduled to start beam tuning at the linac from the beginning of November. After the tuning of the linac and the RCS, the beam operation for the MLF users will be started in the middle of November. The MR beam study will start almost at the same time.


☆━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━…
3. [Particle and Nuclear Physics Division]  
…━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━★

PROGRAM ADVISORY COMMITTEE MEETING (by Takeshi KOMATSUBARA): 

 The 34th Program Advisory Committee (PAC) meeting was held as a hybrid conference on August 3-5. In the committee, chaired by Dr. Rik Yoshida (Argonne National Laboratory), Both new members whose terms began in April 2022 and old members whose terms were completed in March 2022 participated jointly. 
 The status of the experiments was reported, and prospects for the operation from November were discussed. This time three new proposals were submitted. 
https://kds.kek.jp/indico/event/43028/ 
 The PAC report will be available through the following web page. 
http://j-parc.jp/researcher/Hadron/en/PAC_for_NuclPart_e.html 
 The next PAC meeting will be held in January 2023. 

DETERMINATION OF THE PAULI REPULSION BETWEEN QUARKS IN THE SIGMA+ P INTERACTION (by Koji Miwa and Takuya Nanamura)

 Thanks to the mysterious balance of attraction and repulsion in the nuclear force, nuclei can exist stably. Understanding the origin of a repulsive force has been a longstanding challenge in the nuclear study. Oka and Yazaki theoretically pointed out that spin-spin interactions and the Pauli repulsions between quarks have important roles to generate the repulsive force. This Pauli repulsion effects can be studied using hyperon proton scatterings. There is an exciting prediction that the quark Pauli repulsion in the Sigma+ proton channel makes the interaction considerably repulsive due to a distinct Pauli forbidden up-quark pair with the same spin and color configuration. 
 The J-PARC E40 experiment was carried out at the K1.8 beam line of the Hadron Experimental facility from 2018 to 2020 to measure differential cross sections of elastic scatterings between Sigma+ and proton. The experiment successfully measured the differential cross sections in the momentum range of 0.44-0.80 GeV/c for Sigma+ with excellent precision of 10% level with a fine angular interval. As a result, the experiment quantitatively determined the size of the quark Pauli repulsion effects for the first time and concluded it was moderately repulsive. 
 Furthermore, the obtained results are consistent with theoretical calculations by Lattice QCD. This result was published recently in Prog. Theor. Exp. Phys. 2022 093D01 and was selected as the editor's choice. https://doi.org/10.1093/ptep/ptac101

TOWARD HIGH-POWER HIGH-PRECISION EXPERIMENT (by Yoshiaki FUJII)

 Neutrino Experimental Facility, T2K, and SuperKamiokande continue to work hard on improvement of the experimental precision and on higher beam power. 
 Assembly work of the new second electromagnetic horn has been completed, and the excitation test at 320kA has been successfully done. The new target has been made and the installation to the new first horn is in progress. After installation, an excitation test of the first horn will also be carried out. 
 Two-million scintillator cubes for the new detector SuperFGD and its assembly platform have arrived at J-PARC. The structural box of SuperFGD is under test at CERN and will be shipped to J-PARC after the test. Many collaborators are to come to J-PARC for SuperFGD assembly work. VISA applications are on schedule. Disassembling work of the present POD detector will start from October. 
 At SuperKamiokande, additional Gadolinium loading to the water has been completed. Now, the neutron capture efficiency with Gd was increased to 75%. As a result, the neutron detection efficiency is improved by 1.5 times. 
 The T2K collaboration meeting will be held from 10/10 to 10/14, gathering at J-PARC and CERN, with a remote connection between them. We truly hope that all the collaborators can get together at J-PARC in 2023. 
 The JSNS2 experiment at MLF continued the data taking in 2022 and has accumulated 2.56x10^{22} POT so far (26% of approved POT).  The data taking will be restarted from the end of JFY2022. The Double-Chooz experiment donated the 190 PMTs to the JSNS2-II experiment. The installation of PMTs for the new far detector of JSNS2-II has been prepared well. 

Publication 
Search for Electron Antineutrino Appearance in a Long-Baseline Muon Antineutrino Beam, T2K collaboration, 
Phys. Rev. Lett. 124, 161802 (2022), DIO: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.161802 
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.161802

STATUS OF THE COHERENT MUON TO ELECTRON TRANSITION (COMET)
(by Satoshi MIHARA)

 The COMET experiment aims to search for the lepton-flavor violating muon reaction, mu-e conversion, with a sensitivity better than 10-14 in Phase I. 
 Facility and detector construction work continues; the primary proton beamline apparatus including a target chamber has been installed. A mask system, a movable pin-hole collimator, is installed at the entrance of the transport solenoid for studying the beam transport performance of the curved solenoid magnet. Excitation and quench protection system test of the transport solenoid was successfully done in July. 
 The main detector of COMET for its physics measurement, the Cylindrical Drift Chamber (CDC), has been tested on the Tsukuba campus. After completing the final test of electronics cooling with water, the CDC was transported to J-PARC successfully in September for further conditioning on site. 
 The COMET collaboration members came together in Tokai in July for the 1st time after the last face-to-face meeting in 2019. Members who were not able to join the meeting in person attended this meeting remotely to contribute to the discussion toward the start of COMET Phase-alpha, the engineering run, and Phase-I, the physics run. 

STATUS OF THE MUON G-2/ ELECTRIC DIPOLE MOMENT (EDM) (E34)
(by Tsutomu MIBE)

 The E34 collaboration aims for precision measurements of the muon anomalous magnetic moment and electric dipole moment. 
 The commissioning of the surface muon beam at the H-line was concluded by confirming the beam intensity, profile, and momentum distributions at the H1area. For further extension of the beamline to the H2 area, the cabling for the control system was completed. The construction of the radiation shields is ongoing. Preparatory works, such as the re-location of the buried cables, and water piping in the area of the H-line of the experimental building are in progress. A task force, formed in 2019 under the J-PARC center, restarted with renewed members to resolve issues associated with the construction of the H-line experimental building. The collaboration continues to develop theexperimental apparatus. 
Mr. Yuga Nakazawa won second prize in the student poster session on the topic of "High-Power Test of an APF IH-DTL Prototype for the Muon Linac”. 


☆━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━…
4. [Materials and Life Science Division] by Toshiya OTOMO
…━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━★

SHORTENED OPERATING SCHEDULE IN 2022B PERIOD:

 In response to the soaring electricity prices that reflect the recent global situation, J-PARC has reviewed the number of operating days in the 2022B period and has decided to shorten it from the originally planned 4.4 cycles (97.5 days) to 2.4 cycles (53.5 days).
(https://mlfinfo.jp/en/announce/220707.html)
 User operation in the 2022B period will start on November 21st.

BEAM OPERATION ENDED SUCCESSFULLY AND MAINTENANCE WORKS ARE GOING ON

1) Neutron Source
 The beam operation of MLF ended on June 26th with a daily availability of 94.7 % on average since April 1st and the maintenance works during the long outage started. On July 5th, the used mercury target vessel, which was in operation from 2012 to 2014, was transported from MLF to the storage building, which is called RAM building where a total of 5 used target vessels are stored now. The used proton beam window which was replaced in 2020 was cut into pieces for volume reduction by remote handling operation. 
 The remote handling test of the moderator & reflector assembly was carried out using a spare assembly from August 25th to September 12th. Because the operating lifetime of a moderator & reflector assembly is comparatively long, 6 years at 1MW, the last remote handling operation was done more than 10 years ago and the inheritance of technology is very important.  The remote handling procedures were checked carefully to handle the actual radioactive used assembly near future.

PROPOSALS FOR 2022B ROUND WERE APPROVED

2) Neutron Instruments and Science
 For the proposal round of 2022B starting in November, 291 proposals have been submitted for neutron general use proposals and 114 proposals have been approved.
 The Annual Meeting of industrial application for neutron was renewed by adding the JRR-3 facility as well as J-PARC MLF and held as a hybrid meeting on the 14th and 15th of July. The scope of this year is as follows, 1) presenting the status of use of the facility, what the society needs, and required techniques in the industrial field. 2) Showing the technologies (methodologies) that the MLF can provide and their limits. 3) Introducing efforts and contributions to solving the problems on the societal issues like carbon neutrality, digital transformation, and so on.
 The 11th international workshop on sample environment at scattering facilities (ISSE-WS) was successfully held in person at Nasu Town, Tochigi Prefecture, Japan organized by J-PARC, IMSS-KEK, JAEA, CROSS, The University of Tokyo, Tohoku University, and JASRI from August 28th to September 1st. Over 30 participants from abroad could enter into Japan without any problems and joined the workshop. We had around 90 registrants in total in addition to online attendees. 
(https://mlfinfo.jp/sp/isse2022/index.html) 

>From MLF’s recent press release:
(1) “Revisiting the concept of peptide bond planarity in an iron-sulfur protein by neutron structure analysis”
https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abn2276
(2) The research report on “Successful visualization of water molecules in fuel cells on a vehicle using pulsed neutron”
https://www.kek.jp/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/pr20220712.pdf(in Japanese)

OPERATION OF ALL FOUR MUON BEAMLINES SUCCESSFULLY COMPLETED AND CONSTRUCTION AND MAINTENANCE WORKS ARE IN PROGRESS

3) Muon Science Facility (MUSE)
 The H line, which is the last MUSE beamline, started commissioning this January and led a celebratory finish when all four beamlines operated successfully at the end of June. Several issues raised before the summer maintenance will be repaired toward the beam resumption at the end of November.
 Concerning the muon production target, in the last year’s maintenance, the rotating feeder unit was replaced according to the maker’s recommendation considering the wear and tear.
 Since then, the turbulence in the motor torque was confirmed, and it was presumed to be due to the misalignment of the joint attached to the feeder unit. We judged that it was difficult to achieve the required high accuracy of the alignment with the hands-on maintenance with wearing the radiation-hard equipment and decided to use a flexible joint with a high tolerance. The new joint was successfully installed at the beginning of August.
 In the D line, the final focusing magnets of the quadrupole triplet (Q-triplet) and their power suppliers for the D1 area will be replaced with new ones. The existing Q-triplet was designed to focus up to the 30 MeV/c surface muon beam and thus does not allow for a higher momentum beam. Although the surface muon beam is the most widely utilized by users’ experiments, the D line can provide a much higher momentum beam more than 100 MeV/c. The existing Q-triplet can only provide a high momentum beam less effectively. An optimized beam will be delivered by the new Q-triplet and new demands are expected to be stimulated.
 The application for the extension of the H line to the H2 area was submitted to the Nuclear Regulation Authority and accepted on August 24th. In the next step, approval by the nuclear safety council of the surrounding municipalities, is required for the construction to start. In the H2 area, the muon accelerator to 4.3 MeV will be constructed to provide pre-acceleration of ultra-slow muons for the g-2/EDM (the muon anomalous magnetic moment (g-2) and the electric dipole moment) experiment and the transmission muon microscopy.
  Results in D1 and S1 were presented to the press: “Li transport observed by negative and positive muons in an anode material for all-solid-state Li-ion batteries”.
https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jpcc.2c02055
 The Nishikawa Prize from the Foundation for High Energy Accelerator Science was awarded to Drs. S. Nishimura and S. Kanda, and Prof. K. Shimomura et al. for their “Rabi-oscillation Spectroscopy in Precise Measurement of Hyperfine Structure of Muonium Atoms”. 
 For the 2022B beam period, the total number of submitted proposals was 57 for the muon general proposals, of which 21 were approved.


☆━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━…
5. [Nuclear Transmutation Division] by Shin-ichiro MEIGO
…━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━★

WORKSHOP ON J-PARC PROTON BEAM IRRADIATION FACILITY PLAN AND ESTABLISHMENT OF ITS USER COMMUNITY

 On July 28th, a workshop on "J-PARC Proton Beam Irradiation Facility Plan and Establishment of Its User Community" was held as an in-person and online hybrid scheme. There were 133 participants, with 14 in-person and 119 online. After addressing the importance of nuclear transmutation and the current status of the facility planning, the needs of the facility were presented from four potential fields, i.e., material damage, semiconductor soft error testing, radioisotope (RI) production for medical applications, and proton beam applications. A user community of the facility was established. As part of its initial activities, the facility requirements from the four fields will be summarized, and a roadmap for the realization of the facility will be developed. A questionnaire survey of participants' areas of interest revealed that they have high expectations for the proton beams available in the facility at J-PARC in many fields in addition to nuclear transmutation.


☆━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━…
6. [Safety Division] by Yoshihiro NAKANE and Kotaro BESSHO
…━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━★

THE APPLICATION FOR A LICENSE OF THE OPERATION WAS GRANTED

 The application for changes of the radiological license was granted by the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) on August 24. The approved changes in the application were the extension muon beam line in the Materials and Life Science Experimental Facility, the power upgrade and a new primary beam line (COMET) in the Hadron Experimental Facility, and the power upgrade in the Neutrino Experimental Facility.


☆━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━…
7. [Information] 
…━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━★


☆━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━…
8. [Editorial Note]
…━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━★

Past issues are available from the below link.
http://j-parc.jp/c/en/topics/project-newsletter/index.html


┏━…━━…━━…━━…━━…━━…━━…━━…━━…━━…━☆
┃ Editorial Board:
┃ Toshifumi TSUKAMOTO (Chair): toshifumi.tsukamoto at kek.jp 
┃ Kaoru SHIBATA: shibata.kaoru at jaea.go.jp 
┃ Takatoshi MORISHITA: morishita.takatoshi at jaea.go.jp
┃ Jean-Michel POUTISSOU (English Editor): jmp at triumf.ca 
┃ Chiaki SHIRAISHI (Secretary): shiraishi.chiaki at jaea.go.jp
★━…━━…━━…━━…End of Letter…━━…━━…━━…━━…━