Stephen L. Olsen's Home Page
Stephen L. Olsen, Professor of Physics
Department of Physics and Astronomy
University of Hawai'i at Manoa
2505 Correa Road
Honolulu, HI 96822
solsen@phys.hawaii.edu
office:(808) 956-2929
fax:(808) 956-2930
News:
Research
I do research on the properties of the most basic constituents
of matter. This research requires the
use of specialized high energy accelerators ("atom smashers")
that only exist at only a few locations in the world---not,
unfortunately, in Hawaii. However, Hawaii is the closest place in
the U.S. to the world's best facilities for studying
subatomic particles that contain b (for "beauty") quarks:
the Belle experiment at the
KEK laboratory
in Tsukuba Japan; and c (for "charmed") quarks:
the BES-III detector at the
IHEP laboratory in Beijing, China. My UH colleagues and I
take advantage of this proximity and collaborate in research efforts
at both of these laboratories.
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The main motivation for the
Belle experiment
is the
study of differences between the properties of matter and antimatter.
It operates at the KEK laboratory's "B-factory"
KEKB,
which is the world's highest intensity particle accelerator
of its type (i.e., electron(e-)-antielectron(e+) collider).
Although matter-antimatter differences are rather obvious
to us in our everyday life---the Earth, Sun and the Universe
around us are all made only of matter---the
laws of Nature, as we currently understand them, are
remarkably matter-antimatter symmetric. However,
life, the universe, and everything owes its existence to the fact that,
in fact, matter and antimatter aren't quite exact opposites.
Otherwise, in the moments after the big-bang, matter and antimatter
would have almost entirely annihilated one another and left the
cosmos empty.
Differences between matter and antimatter, known as "CP violation,"
and how the Belle experiment studies them are
described in non-technical terms in articles from
The New York Times and
The Economist magazine.
Results from Belle had a significant impact on the
2008 Nobel Prize for Physics
Some (of many) journal articles from Belle:
UH Professor Tom Browder is cospokesperson for the Belle collaboration.
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The
BES III experiment
(as was its predecessor,
BESII)
is specialized for studies of the spectroscopy of subatomic
particles, especially those that
contain charmed quarks. BES III is an all-new
state-of-the-art detector
that started taking data at the new two-ring
Beijing Electron Positron Collider
BEPC II in summer 2008.
Some (of many) journal articles from BES II:
UH Professor Fred Harris is cospokesperson for the BES III
collaboration.)
Service
- Editoral Board member:
Chinese Physics C High Energy Physics and Nuclear Physics.
- Editoral Board member: Modern Physics Letters A
(MPLA) and the International Journal of Modern Physics A
(IJMPA)
- Member: U.S. High Energy Physics Advisory Panel
(HEPAP)
- Principle Investigator: University of Hawaii High Energy Physics Group
(UHHEPG)
Other stuff:
Last modified: January 23, 2009
Stephen L. Olsen / solsen@phys.hawaii.edu