Stanley B. Kowalski

Biography

"Prof. Stanley Kowalski was born in Saskatchewan, Canada. He received his BE (1957) in Engineering Physics and an MS (1958) in Physics from the University of Saskatchewan. He came to MIT as a graduate student in 1958 and received his PhD in Physics from MIT in 1963. He joined the faculty in the MIT Department of Physics in 1964, progressing to Professor of Physics in 1985. In 1991 he was appointed Director of the William H. Bates Linear Accelerator Center and was responsible for managing the research program at this DOE university facility. Prof. Kowalski’s career at MIT was centered on accelerator physics and nuclear physics research. In the late 60’s, he focused his efforts on the design, construction, commissioning and operation of the new Bates 1 GeV electron linear accelerator. This also included the design of the spectrometer systems which were at the heart of the nuclear physics program. He led several efforts to design and develop  magnetic spectrometer systems for use in nuclear research and for medical applications. He invented unique analytic tools which greatly facilitated the design of such instruments. One important set of instruments pioneered the use of energy-loss spectrometry for electron scattering with very high resolution (10-4 Δp/p) at high luminosity. Research operations at Bates began in 1973 and the laboratory set the world standards in high resolution electron scattering throughout the 70’s"

Research Interest

Professor Kowalski's current research program is centered on parity violation experiments using longitudinally polarized high energy electron scattering. The measurements are carried out in Mainz Germany and Jefferson laboratory in the United States. These studies have been under way for more than a decade and have two main goals. One goal is to probe the strangequark structure of the nucleon. A series of measurements now show that the contribution of strange quarks to the charge and magnetic moment of the proton is close to zero. The second goal is to make a precise measurement of the weak charge of the proton. This would measure sin2 θW and be sensitive to new physics beyond the Standard Model at energy scales greater than 5 TeV LHC energies. Initial preliminary results show that the weak charge is consistent with predictions of the Standard Model.