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New Director General of KEK
Since 1 April there is a new man at the wheel of the Japanese accelerator center KEK: Director General Professor Yoji Totsuka. He is the successor of Professor Hirotaka Sugawara who was the successful leader of the laboratory for many years.
Prof. Yoji Totsuka
Totsuka is an old friend of DESY. As a guest scientist, the particle physicist investigated electron-positron collisions in experiments like DASP at the DORIS accelerator (from 1972 to 1976) and JADE at the PETRA accelerator (from 1977 to 1980). From 1996 to 1998, Totsuka was also member of the Physics Research Committee (PRC), an international expert committee and advisory board for DESY's high energy research program.
Since 1991, Professor Totsuka has been a researcher at the Japanese neutrino detectors Kamiokande and Superkamiokande. Moreover, he was Director of the Kamioka Observatory of Tokyo University till September 2002. Totsuka was honored several times, for example in 1995 with the EPS Special Prize of the European Physical Society.
In 1973 Professor Yoji Totsuka came to DESY with a group of physicists from Tokyo University to investigate electron-positron annihilations in the DORIS experiment DASP. Initially, Totsuka made decisive contributions to the construction of the proportional tube chambers of the DASP inner detector.
Shortly after completion and installation of DASP at DORIS, the Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Stanford Linear Accelerator announced the discovery of "J/psi", so that the international DASP team of researchers started with the investigation of the J/psi family and they achieved the first observation of the J/psi with the inner detector of DASP. Totsuka and others were very engaged in the investigation of final states with several photons which eventually led to the discovery of the Pc (today Chic1). This was an important step to understand this new particle family as states of a new quark: the charm quark.
