James Olsen

Position
Professor of Physics
Role
Department Chair
Office Phone
Assistant
Office
310 Jadwin
Advisee(s):
Bio/Description

James Olsen is professor of physics and Department Chair at Princeton University. He received his B.S. in physics from the University of California, Davis, and his Ph.D. in experimental high-energy physics from University of Wisconsin – Madison in 1998. His research interests include the fundamental constituents of matter, such as quarks and leptons, and questions such as why these subatomic particles come in different “flavors” arranged in three separate generations of matter with large mass splittings. His research played a leading role in the search for, and eventual observation of, the Higgs boson in its decay to two bottom quarks using the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), located at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. He was also involved in research elucidating the flavor structure of the quark sector through the study of CP violation using the BaBar detector at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). He is a Sloan Research Fellow, a Kavli Fellow, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Selected Publications
  • C. Palmer, S. Cooperstein, J. Olsen, with the CMS Collaboration, "Observation of Higgs Boson Decay to Bottom Quarks," Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 121801 (2018).
  • D. Lopes Pegna, M. Mooney, J. Olsen, with the CMS Collaboration "Observation of a new boson at a mass of 125 GeV with the CMS experiment at the LHC," Phys. Lett. B 716, 12 (2012).
  • D. Lopes Pegna and J. Olsen, with the CMS Collaboration, "Measurement of the B+ Production Cross Section in pp Collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV", Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 112001 (2011).
  • J. Olsen and A. Telnov, with the BaBar Collaboration, "Observation of CP Violation in B0 -> π+ π-, K+π-", Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 021603 (2007).
  • J. Biesiada and J. Olsen, with the BaBar Collaboration, "Observation of B+ -> K(bar)0K+ and B0 -> K0K(bar)0", Phys. Rev. Lett. 97, 171805 (2006). [J. Biesiada won the 2008 APS Tanaka Dissertation Award for this work.]
  • Y. P. Lau and J. Olsen, with the BaBar Collaboration, "Measurement of γ in B+/- -> D(*)0K+/- Decays with a Dalitz Analysis of D0 -> K0sπ+π- ", Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 121802 (2005).
  • N. Danielson and J. Olsen, with the BaBar Collaboration, "Direct CP Violating Asymmetry in B0 -> K+π- Decays", Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 131801 (2004).