Dr. Akito Arima has passed away

Dr. Akito Arima has passed away on December 6, 2020 at the age of 90. We would like to
express our sincere condolences to his family and friends. He will be missed by all who
knew him. It would not be an exaggeration to say that during his term as President of
RIKEN, Dr. Arima had built the foundation for the RIKEN Nishina Center of today with
his tremendous support and contribution in budgeting for the RIBF, opening of the RIKEN
Facility Office at RAL and RIKEN BNL Research Center.

Dr. Arima had made numerus outstanding achievements in theory of nuclear structure
physics. Not only was this limited to configuration mixing theory and cluster model but
by proposing and developing “Interacting Boson Model”, he had succeeded in unifiedly
describing collective motions such as nuclear oscillation and deformation.

With these exceptional achievements, Dr. Arima won numerous prestigious awards both domestic
and international including the Nishina Memorial Prize, Japan’s Order of Culture, Tom
W. Bonner Prize in Nuclear Physics from American Physical Society, and Legion of Honor
from France. We will continue to honor his legacy by stepping up our research　activity
to the next level.

Hiroyoshi Sakurai
Director of the RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science