The Japanese Diet approved Hyper-Kamiokande’s (Hyper-K) supplementary budget for FY2019, which includes the first-year construction budget of 3.5 billion yen ($31.7 million) for the Hyper-Kamiokande project. Operations will begin in 2027.

Hyper-K, a world-leading international scientific research project hosted by Japan, aims to elucidate the origin of matter and the Grand Unified Theory of elementary particles. The project consists of the Hyper-K detector, which has an 8.4 times larger fiducial mass than its predecessor, Super-Kamiokande, equipped with newly developed high sensitivity photosensors and a high intensity neutrino beam produced by an upgraded Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex (J-PARC) accelerator facility.

The Japanese contribution will include the cavern excavation, construction of the water container tank and its structure, half of the photosensors for the inner detector, the main part of the water system, Tier-0 offline computing, a J-PARC accelerator upgrade and construction of a new experimental facility for the near detector complex. International contributions will include the rest of photosensors for the inner detector, sensor covers, light collectors, photosensors for the outer detector, readout electronics, data acquisition system, water system upgrade, detector calibration systems, downstream offline computing system and the near/intermediate detector complex.

KEK, Japan’s High Energy Accelerator Research Organization, closed the announcement by stating that they hope to work together with domestic and international colleagues for the development of neutrino physics and astrophysics via Hyper-K.