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.c The Associated Press

TOKYO (AP) - Japan plans to accelerate plans for a $1.7 billion physics facility in an attempt to keep the nation's Nobel Prize-winning research ahead of U.S. and European rivals, a newspaper reported Sunday.

The facility to generate subatomic particles called neutrinos will be built next year, three years earlier than planned, according to the national newspaper, Yomiuri. The facility will be constructed in Tokaimura, about 70 miles northeast of Tokyo.

The facility is designed to study the nature of neutrinos, elusive particles that stream from the sun by the billions.

The United States and some European nations are currently building similar facilities.

A Japanese and two American astrophysicists won the Nobel Prize in physics last year for using neutrinos - some of the most obscure particles and waves in nature - to increase understanding of the universe.

Researchers plan to shoot a beam of neutrinos from Tokaimura to a huge underground neutrino detection chamber in Kamioka, about 180 miles away.

The chamber, the Super-Kamiokande, is the world's largest neutrino detector. It was built in an abandoned copper mine in mountains 170 miles west of Japan's capital, and is operated by the University of Tokyo.

Japanese astrophysicist Masatoshi Koshiba won the Nobel Prize in physics last year for his work at the Kamiokande detector, in which he discovered neutrinos coming from distant supernova explosions, some of the brightest objects in the universe.

Koshiba campaigned for the government's decision to accelerate the project, urging education ministry officials to help young scientists in their research to aim for another Nobel Prize, according to Yomiuri.


 
08/23/03 07:01 EDT
   

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