Boleslaw "Bolek" Wyslouch PhD '87

Research Interests

Professor Boleslaw (Bolek) Wyslouch is studying the interactions between subatomic particles by looking at the very energetic collisions of heavy ions. He and his colleagues are studying extremely hot and dense states of nuclear matter. Professor Wyslouch conducts experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. He is one of the founders and leaders of the heavy ion program in the CMS experiment, one of the large, multipurpose particle detectors at LHC. The results from the first runs of LHC show, among others, that the hot plasma strongly suppresses production of high energy jets and it redistributes the jet energy among slow particles. The CMS group also discovered surprisingly strong collective effects in ion-ion collisions but also proton-proton and proton-ion collision. The detailed investigations of these phenomena will last likely for the next several years with LHC planning to increase energy and intensity of the beams. Before joining CMS Professor Wyslouch conducted multiple high energy and nuclear physics experiments at CERN and at Brookhaven National Laboratory RHIC facility. Professor Wyslouch is interested in the computational aspects of nuclear and high energy experiments as well as the development of trigger algorithms for these experiments.

Biographical Sketch

After studying Physics at the University of Warsaw, Professor Boleslaw (Bolek) Wyslouch began his association with MIT in 1983, first as a doctoral student, where he earned a Ph.D. in Physics in 1987. In 1988, he became a postdoctoral associate with MIT’s Laboratory for Nuclear Science (LNS) stationed at CERN, followed by a fellowship at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland in 1988 and 1989. In 1990 he returned to MIT as a postdoctoral associate, before being named an Assistant Professor in 1991. Professor Wyslouch was promoted to Associate Professor without tenure in 1997 and Associate Professor with tenure in July 1998. In July 2002, he was promoted to full Professor. He is currently serving as Director of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science as of 2015  and Director of the Bates Research and Engineering Center since 2018.