Lawrence W. Jones

Lawrence W. Jones, professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, passed away on 30 June 2023. An experimental particle physicist, he contributed to important developments in accelerators and detectors. Over the course of his career, he 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, di-muon events, neutrino physics, and charm production.

Larry was 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, then returned to Northwestern to complete a BS in zoology and physics in 1948 and an MS in 1949.

After completing a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1952, he came to the University of Michigan to begin a lifetime career in the physics faculty, where he was promoted to full professor in 1963. He served as the physics department chair from 1982 to 1987 and retired in 1998.

In the 1950s, Larry was instrumental in the Midwestern Universities Research Association (MURA), a consortium of US universities that developed key concepts for colliding beams and built the first fixed-focus alternating gradient accelerator. Much later, in his retirement, Larry coauthored with other MURA veterans a retrospective volume, Innovation Was Not Enough: A History of the Midwestern Universities Research Association (MURA) (World Scientific).

In the early 1960s, Larry carried out experiments with Martin Perl (then at Michigan) on pion–proton scattering experiments at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory’s Bevatron. One highlight of that collaboration was his co-mentoring the PhD dissertation in 1962 of future Nobel laureate Samuel C. C. Ting.

During his career, Larry visited CERN as a Ford Foundation Fellow (1961–62) and as a Guggenheim Fellow (1964–65). He contributed to cosmic-ray experiments on Mount Evans, Colorado, and at nearby Echo Lake in the late 1960s and in the 1970s.

In 1983 Larry joined the CERN Large Electron–Positron collider experiment L3, 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. Larry also contributed to the construction of L3 Cosmics, a program to trigger on and measure cosmic rays, using L3’s precision muon detector and surrounding solenoidal magnet.

Larry was a talented raconteur, with an encyclopedic mind drawn to many different fields. His interest in entomology led to a species of beetle (Cryptorhinula jonsi) being named after him. On the first Earth Day, in 1970, he introduced the term “liquid hydrogen fuel economy,” and in 1976, he joined the advisory board of the International Association for Hydrogen Energy. A vigorous athlete, Larry remained physically active after retirement, hiking, skiing, and windsurfing into his 80s.

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