Lawrence W. Jones

Lawrence W. Jones (born 1925) is a professor emeritus in the Physics Department at the University of Michigan. His field of interest is high energy particle physics.

Early life and education

Lawrence Jones' father was C. Herbert Jones (1889-1987), a mathematics teacher at New Trier High School from 1923 to 1958. Lawrence Jones graduated from New Trier in 1943.

Jones entered Northwestern University in the summer of 1943 and was drafted into the US Army in February 1944. He was shipped to Europe on the RMS Aquitania in December 1944, and served in the Signal Corps Company of the 35th Infantry Division until December 1945, when he returned to the United States on the RMS Queen Mary. Jones returned to Northwestern for the spring term in 1946 and earned a B.S. with a double major in zoology and physics 1948 and M.S. 1949. In 1952 he received a Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley. He and his wife Ruth married in 1950, and they have three children.

Career

Jones worked his entire career at the University of Michigan, where he joined the physics faculty as an instructor in 1952. He became an assistant professor there in 1956 and associate professor in 1960. He was promoted to professor in 1963, and he served as physics department chair between 1982–1987.

With Martin Perl, he was dissertation advisor to Samuel C. C. Ting in 1962.

Research

Jones' research has involved not only particle accelerator design and experiments at proton accelerators, but also detector development and cosmic ray research. He collaborated in the 1950s in the Midwestern Universities Research Association (MURA), which developed the concept of colliding beams in modern particle accelerators. He contributed to development of the scintillation chamber, optical spark chamber, and the ionization calorimeter for hadron energy measurement. He participated in experiments on hadron cross-sections as well as elastic and inelastic scattering and production of particles, dimuons, neutrinos, and proton charm production.

Since 1983, Jones has participated in the L3 experiment led by his former student and Nobel laureate, Samuel C.C. Ting. He and Michigan colleagues designed, constructed, and installed the hadron calorimeter. He has also contributed to research in medical radioisotope imaging and was an early proponent of the hydrogen fuel economy.

Regents of the University of Michigan named Jones professor emeritus of physics in 1998.

Honors

Jones was a Ford Foundation Fellow (1961–1962) and a Guggenheim Fellow (1964–1965) at CERN in Switzerland.

Selected publications

With four colleagues, he wrote Innovation was not Enough; the History of the Midwestern Universities Research Association (MURA), which World Scientific published in 2009, describing their work researching particle accelerator design between1950–1960.

Jones has co-authored 369 publications and has solo authored 6 papers.