KEK / J-PARC — COMET Collaboration
KEK / J-PARC — COMET Collaboration
Research title
The COMET (Coherent Muon to Electron Transition) experiment, carried out at J-PARC (Tokai, Japan) with the global scientific support of KEK.
Research location
It searches for the rarest phenomenon of charged lepton flavour violation (CLFV) — the direct conversion of muons into electrons (μ → e) without the emission of neutrinos.
Scope of the study
Improving the world sensitivity record by a factor of 10,000 (to the 10⁻¹⁷ level) using a muon beam of record-high intensity.
Research objective
Any observation of CLFV would be unambiguous evidence of “new physics” beyond the Standard Model (for example supersymmetry).
Contribution of GTU researchers to the experiment
Georgian Technical University’s (GTU) strategic partnership with Japan’s leading scientific centres began in 2014, when researchers of GTU’s Institute of Quantum Physics and Engineering Technologies laid the foundations of their collaboration with KEK (Tsukuba) and J-PARC (Tokai). In October 2024 a new Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between GTU and KEK, joined also by Japan’s SOKENDAI University — this opens the way for GTU students to joint master’s and doctoral programmes and to internships in Japan. KEK Professor Satoshi Mihara has been elected an honorary doctor of GTU.
The GTU team’s contribution is practical and engineering-oriented: together with the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, the team designed and built one of the largest subdetectors of the experiment — the Cosmic Ray Veto system. Team members assemble and test the straw tube system (Straw Tracker) with their own hands in Japanese laboratories — ultra-thin (12–20 micron) tubes produced without glue, by ultrasonic welding. The group also carries out detector optimisation modelling on the GEANT4 platform.
Contribution of GTU researchers to the experiment
Zviad Tsamalaidze
Yuri Bagaturia
David Chokheli
Giorgi Adamov
David Lomidze
Irakli Lomidze
Nika Tsverava
Application potential
- Space industry — manufacturing of satellite components
- Processing of advanced aerospace materials
- High-precision gas chromatography