Message from the Director (Kiyoshi YOSHIKAWA)

The Institute of Advanced Energy celebrated its fifth anniversary in May, 2000 just at the historical break of a new millennium and a new century. The mission of our institute--generation, conversion, and utilization of environment-conscious, advanced, high-quality energy--is certainly becoming more and more relevant in this new era.

World-wide globalization of economical activities in addition to rapid growth of world population while improving and resolving current environmental issues would require far more publicly-acceptable energies both in quantity and quality.

In this FY 2000, two fundamental facilities, i.e., Heliotron-J for plasma researches and DuET for material-particle interaction researches started their operation successfully. At the same time, several medium-sized devices in other research areas, such as quantum radiation and bio-energy are also being constructed with the support and encouragement of the institute members.

According to the policy of the institute, i.e., reviewing every 5 years, we have started overall review activities by the distinguished external reviewers from academic, and industrial areas, including 4 foreigners. This review consists of two-stages, i.e., the first-stage review of three priority research fields such as, nuclear fusion energy, quantum radiation energy, and bio-energy which our institute are particularly encouraging, followed by the second-stage review of the overall institute activities, including not only academic researches, but also administration issues we carried out so far, and the review report is expected to be completed by the end of FY2001.

This annual report is an updated summary of the researches carried out in FY2000 at our institute including collaboration with other institutions. It would be our great pleasure if this report could further provide you with the sufficient understanding of our current activities.

March 2001
Kiyoshi YOSHIKAWA

1998.4 - 2000.3