Mark Vagins

Dr. Mark Vagins is Deputy Director and Professor at the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU), a World Premier International Research Center Initiative (WPI) at The University of Tokyo. He is an experimental physicist studying neutrinos, and has been involved with the Super-Kamiokande (SK) experiment since 1994, as well as various other Japan-based neutrino projects (K2K, T2K, and Hyper-Kamiokande). He and his collaborators have been studying how to add water-soluble gadolinium salt into the SK water tank in order to greatly enhance the detector’s sensitivity. After nearly two decades’ of work, 50,000 tons of gadolinium was introduced into the ultrapure water tank of SK, and now Vagins and his team are awaiting the world's first observation of the diffuse supernova neutrino background flux. Vagins was also the first full-time non-Japanese professor at Kavli IPMU, and as one of the Institute's senior experimentalists he has continued to support and drive research at the Institute.