On October 6, 2015, the winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics 2015 were determined. It was announced that Takaaki Kajita, Director of the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research (ICRR) of the University of Tokyo, was one of the winners.
Mr. Kajita discovered that neutrinos, a type of elementary particle that are the smallest units which make up matter, have mass based on the experiments he conducted at the Super-Kamiokande, a neutrino detector installed 1,000 meters underground at Kamioka Mine (Hida-shi, Gifu). He was honored with the Nobel Prize in Physics for his great discovery that provides even more insight into the mystery of how the universe was born by challenging the accepted myth that neutrinos do not have mass.
In 2002, Masatoshi Koshiba, an Emeritus Professor at the University of Tokyo and the former teacher of Mr. Kajita, also received the Nobel Prize in Physics for being the first in the world to observe neutrinos at the Kamiokande, the detector that preceded the Super-Kamiokande.
For both the Kamiokande and the Super-Kamiokande, Mitsui Kinzoku was involved with the construction of the space inside the mine, using the mine technologies it has cultivated over the years.
It is a great honor and pleasure for the employees of the Mitsui Kinzoku Group to help support great research experiments by using our mine technologies to provide the space inside the mine. These efforts helped bring about the emergence of the second Nobel Prize winner.
There are now plans to construct a next-generation supersized detector at the neutrino facility. We hope to make another contribution to this project moving forward.