Experimental particle physicist Lawrence W Jones, a well-respected mentor and educator who contributed to important developments in accelerators and detectors, passed away on 30 June 2023.
Born in Evanston, Illinois on 16 November 1925, he enrolled at Northwestern University in autumn 1943 but was drafted into the US army a few months later. He served in Europe during World War II in 1944 and 1945, returning to Northwestern to complete a BSc in zoology and physics in 1948, followed by an MSc in 1949. After completing a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1952, Jones went to the University of Michigan to begin a lifetime career in the physics faculty. In 1962 he acted as dissertation adviser to future Nobel laureate Samuel Ting and was promoted to full professor in 1963. He served as the physics department chair from 1982 to 1987 and was named professor emeritus in 1998.
Jones collaborated in the 1950s in the Midwestern Universities Research Association, a collaboration of US universities that developed key concepts for colliding beams, and built the first fixed-focus alternating gradient accelerator. Over the course of his career, Jones also contributed to the development of scintillation counters, optical spark chambers and hadron calorimeters. He participated in experiments designed to measure inelastic and elastic scattering, particle production, dimuon events, neutrino physics and charm production.
Jones came to CERN as a Ford Foundation Fellow (1961–1962) and as a Guggenheim Fellow (1964–1965), and then contributed to cosmic-ray experiments on Mount Evans, Colorado and nearby Echo Lake. In 1983 he joined the L3 experiment at LEP, which was led by his former student Ting. The Michigan team, led by Byron Roe, helped to design, construct and install the experiment’s hadron calorimeter – a key component used to determine the number of elementary neutrino families. Jones also contributed to the construction of L3 cosmics, a programme to trigger on and measure cosmic rays using the detector’s precision muon detector and surrounding solenoidal magnet.
Jones’ interest in entomology led to a species of beetle (Cryptorhinula jonsi) being named after him. On the first Earth Day, in 1970, Jones introduced the term “liquid hydrogen fuel economy” and, in 1976, he joined the advisory board of the International Association for Hydrogen Energy. He had a long involvement with the Ann Arbor Ecology Center, which he led in 1974–1975, and became co-chair of the Michigan Environmental Council’s Science Advisory Committee in 2000.
