Director's Corner
8 October 2009
 Barry Barish |
Toshiaki Tauchi, a would-be rocket scientist, joins the GDE Executive Committee
The expansion of the Global Design Effort Executive Committee (EC) is complete. Today I announce that Toshiaki Tauchi has accepted my invitation and has joined the EC. I enthusiastically welcome him! I first announced my intent to expand the EC by three members last spring in order that we have the breadth of knowledge and skills needed to make informed decisions on both technical and policy issues during the next phase of our activities. Toshiaki is well known within the ILC R&D activities and has been a mainstay of our critical work on interface issues between the accelerator and detectors.
 Toshiaki Tauchi (KEK), the newest member of the GDE Executive Committee |
Toshiaki Tauchi received his PhD in experimental high-energy physics from Nagoya University in 1981. He came to SLAC as a visiting researcher working on the Large Aperture Solenoid Spectrometer (LASS) experiment and then went to KEK as a Research Associate in 1982 working on the TOPAZ (stands for 'TOP And Z' named by Ryoichi Kajikawa, a professor emeritus at Nagoya University, who was Toshiaki’s supervisor at the university) experiment at the TRISTAN e+e- collider. He was promoted to Associate Professor at KEK in 1989 and began spending some of his research efforts on R&D toward a future linear collider at that time, then specialised in the area of issues in the interaction region and on issues at the interface between the machine and detectors. In recent years, he has worked on the Accelerator Test Facility (ATF) facility, a crucial element in our R&D programme, in particular to understand and demonstrate making the tiny beam spots required by the ILC.
Toshiaki confesses that his dream during childhood was to become a professional baseball player. There was a famous home-run hitter Tohru Mori at the Chunichi Dragons, the team based in his hometown. He joined the baseball club at junior high school, and mountain climbing club at the high school, being a captain for both club. Toshiaki followed his dreams, but a different one, after witnessing Apollo 11's landing on the moon on TV. At that point his dream shifted to becoming rocket engineer and that inspired him towards science. He became interested in physics upon being exposed to quantum theory in high school. Learning about incredibly small things and multiplier factor like 10-19, or existence of huge order of magnitudes fascinated him and he started thinking about majoring physics at the University.
 Tauchi (left) receiving pointers from Kaoru Yokoya (KEK), also an EC member |
He did more than study physics in University and, in addition, joined the Syakuhachi club at the University, playing the Japanese traditional flute made out of bamboo. He enjoyed playing it with the Koto, also Japanese traditional instrument played by girls belonging to Koto club from nearby Women's university. Not to be confined to physics and music, Toshiaki enjoys cycling and mountain climbing on his free day and admires Albert Einstein and Shoichi Sakata.
Tauchi has commented on his becoming a member of the GDE EC. “As a physicist, I would like to start doing experiments as soon as possible, ideally, with a wonderful experimental environment such as high energy e+e- having little back ground noise. But if you make ideal machine to fulfil all the demand from the physics side, this will not be feasible. ILC is the number one future project and everybody involved should think together as one project, sharing important decisions in real time. I would be very happy to contribute to making better communication between GDE and the detector community. I am a sort of 'slow starter', so I would like to start first being a careful observer,” he said.
Toshiaki shows both wisdom and an understanding of the special skills he brings to the EC. My desire in expanding the EC was to generally give it more strength to meet the demands of developing a technical design and project implementation plan over the next few years, while overseeing all aspects of the ILC / GDE collaboration. I believe we have strengthened an already well functioning EC with the additions of Garbincius, Delahaye and Tauchi, each of whom bring us significant and important new strengths.
-- Barry Barish