The American Physical Society has awarded a 2016 W.K.H. Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics to Stephen Olsen, a University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa emeritus professor in physics.
This prize is the American Physical Society’ 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.
About Olsen
Olsen was a UH Mānoa faculty member from 1992-2009. He led the high energy physics group at the university 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, 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 UH Mānoa, 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.
—From the A Department of Physics and Astronomy
