LiteBIRD is a next-generation satellite mission to measure the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. On large angular scales the B-mode polarization of the CMB carries the imprint of primordial gravitational waves, and its precise measurement would provide a powerful probe of the epoch of inflation. The goal of LiteBIRD is to achieve a measurement of the characterizing tensor to scalar ratio r to an uncertainty of δr = 0.001. In order to achieve this goal we will employ a kilopixel superconducting detector array on a cryogenically cooled sub-Kelvin focal plane with an optical system at a temperature of 4 K. We are currently considering two detector array options; transition edge sensor (TES) bolometers and microwave kinetic inductance detectors (MKID). In this paper we give an overview of LiteBIRD and describe a TES-based polarimeter designed to achieve the target sensitivity of 2 µK·arcmin over the frequency range 50 to 320 GHz.

Single-and double-heavy baryons are studied in the constituent quark model. The model Hamiltonian is chosen as a standard one with two exceptions : (1) The color-Coulomb term depend on quark masses, and (2) an antisymmetric LS force is introduced. Model parameters are fixed by the strange baryon spectra, Λ and Σ baryons. The masses of the observed charmed and bottomed baryons are, then, fairly well reproduced. Our focus is on the low-lying negative-parity states, in which the heavy baryons show specific excitation modes reflecting the mass differences of heavy and light quarks. By changing quark masses from the SU(3) limit to the strange quark mass, further to the charm and bottom quark masses, we demonstrate that the spectra change from the SU(3) symmetry patterns to the heavy quark symmetry ones.

We report cosmic-ray proton and helium spectra in energy ranges of 1È120 GeV nucleon~1 and 1È54 GeV nucleon~1, respectively, measured by a Ñight of the Balloon-borne Experiment with Superconducting Spectrometer (BESS) in 1998. The magnetic rigidity of the cosmic ray was reliably determined by highly precise measurement of the circular track in a uniform solenoidal magnetic Ðeld of 1 T. Those spectra were determined within overall uncertainties of^5% for protons and^10% for helium nuclei including statistical and systematic errors.

We measured low energy cosmic-ray proton and helium spectra in the kinetic energy range 0.215 -21.5 GeV/n at different solar activities during a period from 1997 to 2002. The observations were carried out with the BESS spectrometer launched on a balloon at Lynn Lake, Canada. A calculation for the correction of secondary particle backgrounds from the overlying atmosphere was improved by using the measured spectra at small atmospheric depths ranging from 5 through 37 g/cm 2 . The uncertainties including statistical and systematic errors of the obtained spectra at the top of atmosphere are 5-7% for protons and 6-9% for helium nuclei in the energy range 0.5 -5 GeV/n.

Primary and atmospheric cosmic-ray spectra were precisely measured with the BESS-TeV spectrometer. The spectrometer was upgraded from BESS-98 to achieve seven times higher resolution in momentum measurement. We report absolute fluxes of primary protons and helium nuclei in the energy ranges, 1-540 GeV and 1-250 GeV/n, respectively, and absolute flux of atmospheric muons in the momentum range 0.6-400 GeV/c.