A Measurement of the Strange Quark Contributions to the Electromagnetic Form Factors of the Nucleon

G0 is a parity violating electron scattering program at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, and its forward angle measurement is reported in this thesis. In this experiment, parity violating asymmetries of elastic electron-proton scattering were measured over a range of four-momentum transfer from 0.12 to 1.0 (GeV/c)2. From the asymmetries, linear combinations of the strange electric and magnetic form factors of the nucleon, G$$s\atop{E}$$ + ηG$$s\atop{M}$$, are extracted over the same kinematic range. These results, combined with existing data from other experiments, indicate that both G$$s\atop{E}$$ and ηG$$s\atop{M}$$ are non-zero and dependent on the four-momentum transfer, with imply non-trivial strange quark contributions to the low energy electromagnetic properties of the nucleon.