OIST Presidential Lecture - "The Dark Side of the Universe" by Dr. Hitoshi Murayama

As a first of OIST Presidential Lecture Series, Dr. Hitoshi Murayama, Director of Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, the University of Tokyo, will talk about Dark Matter and Dark Energy, which are considered to make up 95% of the Universe.

Dark Matter is a part of the reason why we exist. There is plenty of evidence that dark matter exists in our own galaxy, other galaxies, and in clusters of galaxies.  On the other hand, Dark Energy is speeding up the expansion of the Universe, and it may even lead the Universe to become infinitely fast and come to an end. Dr. Murayama will discuss what researchers are doing, and trying to understand what these are.

Dr. Murayama received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Tokyo in 1991, held research positions at Tohoku University and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), and has been on faculty at University of California, Berkeley since 1995. Currently he is a senior staff member at LBNL and MacAdams Professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Since 2007, he has also been the founding director of Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe at the University of Tokyo. He received the 2002 Yukawa Commemoration Prize and the 2017 Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Award. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as the Science Council of Japan. Nature’s deep puzzles - from eccentric particles to dark matter to why our universe is expanding faster - are what he strives to solve.

The lecture is in English and is open to the public.