Two major particle physics labs are a couple of hundred kilometres south of Sendai. The earthquake struck just before a seminar to announce the first T2K neutrino results

Since Japanese friends and colleagues are major collaborators at CERN, the horrible news and pictures of the earthquake and tsunami come with added immediacy. The situation is obviously very serious.

The T2K neutrino experiment was just about to announce important new results when the earthquake struck. A series of planned seminars around the world has been postponed until the results can be announced first in Japan as planned. Here's a UK site with some background information about T2K itself. Apparently all the people from the neutrino experiment hall of T2K were evacuated safely, though it is very hard to confirm anything at the moment.

The websites of the major high-energy physics labs, KEK and J-PARC, are currently offline, along with all email addresses of my colleagues there. Apparently Monday is the earliest possible time for reinstatement.

Tokai, where J-PARC is sited and where the neutrinos for T2K are generated, is right on the east coast. The Canadian lab, TRIUMF, which is a collaborator on T2K, has some pictures of the site here.

Of course my thoughts, like those of many, are with those friends and colleagues affected, their families, and all victims of this disaster.