How long have you been working in sPHENIX and at what institution?
I've been working in sPHENIX for about eight months.
I joined the collaboration in April 2025 as a fresh Ph.D. student at Kyoto University.
What is the focus of your work on the sPHENIX experiment? What is the title of your Ph.D. or tentative title?
My current work is mainly on the INTT, especially addressing the hit carryover issue, where the next trigger arrives too early and some hits are carried over to the next event due to mis-associated GTM BCOs.
For my Ph.D. thesis, I am just starting an analysis of low-pT direct photons in p+p collisions to study the proton spin structure. Eventually, I would like to match these direct photons to pair-produced jets to extract polarized parton distribution functions. A tentative title would be “Transverse Single-Spin Asymmetry for Jet–Photon Pair Production in Polarized p+p Collisions at √s = 200 GeV.”
Where did you grow up and what is your educational background before your current position?
I was born at Oita, a prefecture of western Japan known for its hot springs and chicken dishes such as fried chicken. I spent most of my childhood and youth in Oita before moving to Kyoto to enter Kyoto university.
I completed both my undergraduate and master's degrees at Kyoto University. In my master's course, I developed prototypes of Multi-gap Resistive Plate Chambers (MRPCs) for a future experiment at J-PARC. My main task was to find a new high-voltage electrode material to replace a proven but discontinued one. Most of my time during my master's program was spent assembling prototypes using the new candidate materials, conducting beam tests with a few-GeV electron beam at SPring-8, and evaluating their performance (efficiency, time resolution, etc.).
Awards or biggest talk highlight?
Although this award was for work for my master’s program and in a different collaboration, you can find my talk from RPC2024 here: https://indico.global/event/6191/page/1131-prizes-new
In this talk, I presented a prototype MRPC that demonstrated outstanding performance: an efficiency above 99%, a time resolution of 66 ps, and a position resolution of 0.77 mm in the best case. Achieving such high resolutions in both timing and position simultaneously was a major highlight of the work.
How did you decide to go into heavy ion or spin research?
I've been interested in spin physics since I was a master's student. At that time, I studied topics in the field alongside my main research in hadron physics at J-PARC. I was fascinated by describing hadrons in terms of quarks and gluons, and I felt that spin physics allows a more direct exploration of partons.
In Japan, it is not very common to change one's research field after the master's degree. However, it was not realistic for me to continue my master's research as a Ph.D. thesis topic, since the experiment was still in the planning stage and would not be realized for about ten years. I was looking for a Ph.D. topic, and I heard that the INTT group at sPHENIX was welcoming new students. Kyoto University was not a member of sPHENIX at the time, but the opportunity to work in an international collaboration was very appealing. My supervisor was also interested in spin physics, so we decided to join sPHENIX as the Kyoto University group.
What do you like to do in your spare time?
I like fishing. I started fishing from the seashore when I was a junior high school student after some friends invited me on a fishing trip. We rode our bicycles to every port in our hometown. After entering university, I joined a fishing club and enjoyed fishing in various places around Japan, including a deserted island that takes about three hours to reach by high-speed boat. I would love to go fishing on Long Island someday.
Fun fact?
I have caught or at least hooked Yellowtail Kingfish, Yellow Fin Tuna, and even a Brown Booby (I couldn’t dodge it when it dove straight down from the sky and bit my lure!).