Rowson currently works on the Enriched Xenon Observatory experiment, which is searching for an extremely rare type of particle decay that, if found, would prove that neutrinos are their own antiparticles.
However, his election as an APS fellow recognizes a long history of accomplishment that began more than two decades ago at the SLAC Linear Collider (SLC). The SLC was being used to produce Z bosons, and the results of its particle collisions were recorded by a detector called SLD. Rowson co-led a group that used the detector to perform a precise test of the Standard Model of particle physics by measuring a property called ALR, the left-right polarization of asymmetry in Z boson production. These measurements provided evidence that within the context of the Standard Model, the then-unobserved Higgs boson, which was thought to give subatomic particles their mass, should itself have a mass of less than 133 GeV.