DOE to Provide $6 Million for U.S.-Japan Cooperative Research in High Energy Physics

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $6 million for collaborative research in high energy physics that involves substantial collaboration with Japanese investigators. Research is expected to support current experiments or technology development of mutual interest to U.S.-Japan collaborations in particle physics.

“Strong collaboration between scientists in the U.S. and Japan enables us to tackle challenging questions that deepen our understanding of the universe,” said Jim Siegrist, Associate Director of Science for High Energy Physics. “This program builds on more than forty years of successful cooperative efforts between American and Japanese scientists that enable world-leading research and advance cutting-edge tools for science.”

Collaboration between U.S. and Japanese scientists has enabled progress in some of the most challenging areas in high energy physics. Working together, researchers explore the universe at the smallest and largest scales, from the most elementary constituents of matter and energy to the nature of space and time. The long history of U.S.-Japan cooperation includes many significant milestones, such as the contributions by Japanese collaborators on the Collider Detector at Fermilab experiment at the Fermilab Tevatron Collider to the discovery of the top quark in 1995.

Research will advance the development of accelerator and detector technologies that will benefit future research on the Higgs boson, neutrinos, dark matter, and other topics in high energy physics. Research supported under this initiative is expected to include experimental work at DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and at the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex (J-PARC) in Japan, as well as the study of rare particles produced at the SuperKEKB collider at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) in Japan.

Applications will be open to DOE national laboratories as lead institutions, with potential subawards to universities, industry, and nonprofit institutions. Each U.S.-Japan collaboration is intended to have its Japanese Principal Investigators apply to a coordinated call by KEK for support in the collaborative activity. Total DOE funding is expected to be approximately $6 million for awards lasting up to three years in duration, with funding contingent on congressional appropriations.

The DOE Laboratory Program Announcement, sponsored by the Office of High Energy Physics within the DOE Office of Science, can be found here.