UH Physics emeritus professor wins Panofsky Prize

University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
Contact:
Thomas Browder, (808) 956-2936
Professor , Physics and Astronomy
Pui Lam, (808) 956-2988
Chair, Physics and Astronomy
Posted: Oct 8, 2015

Steve Olsen
Steve Olsen

The American Physical Society (APS) has awarded the 2016 W.K.H. Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics to Stephen Olsen, Fumihiko Takasaki, Jonathan Dorfan and David Hitlin. This is APS' highest award for experimental particle physics.  It recognizes the B factory experiments (Belle at KEK and BaBar at SLAC), which observed large CP violation (matter-antimatter asymmetry) in the B meson sector in 2001, and also provided experimental confirmation of the Kobayashi-Maskawa hypothesis for the origin of CP violation, which was later recognized by the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Steve Olsen was a UHM faculty from 1992-2009. He led the high energy physics group at UHM for many years and was one of the founders of the Belle experiment at KEK in Tsukuba, Japan. In addition to his work on CP violation (matter-antimatter asymmetries), he discovered a series of unexpected new particles referred to as the X, Y and Z mesons. These have revolutionized the field of hadron spectroscopy in particle physics.

Olsen was also one of the first western scientists to do collaborative research in particle physics in Japan and China.

Upon retirement from UHM, he moved to Seoul National University and is at now working on the AMORE double-beta decay underground experiment at the Center for Undergound Physics
in Daejeon, Korea.

For more information, visit: http://www.phys.hawaii.edu/