Sheldon Leslie Stone (February 14, 1946 October 6, 2021) was a distinguished professor of physics at

Syracuse University Syracuse University (informally 'Cuse or SU) is a Private university, private research university in Syracuse, New York. Established in 1870 with roots in the Methodist Episcopal Church, the university has been nonsectarian since 1920. Locate ...

. He is best known for his work in experimental elementary particle physics, the Large Hadron Collider beauty experiment (LHCb), and B decays. He made significant contributions in the areas of data analysis, LHCb detector design and construction, and phenomenology.

Biography

Stone earned a B.S. in Physics from the

Brooklyn College Brooklyn College is a public university in Brooklyn, Brooklyn, New York. It is part of the City University of New York system and enrolls about 15,000 undergraduate and 2,800 graduate students on a 35-acre campus. Being New York City's first publ ...

in 1967 and completed his PhD in 1972 at the

University of Rochester The University of Rochester (U of R, UR, or U of Rochester) is a private research university in Rochester, New York. The university grants undergraduate and graduate degrees, including doctoral and professional degrees. The University of Roc ...

under the guidance of Thomas Ferbel. Stone began his career as an assistant professor of Physics in 1973 at

Vanderbilt University Vanderbilt University (informally Vandy or VU) is a private research university in Nashville, Tennessee. Founded in 1873, it was named in honor of shipping and rail magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, who provided the school its initial $1-million ...

, where he stayed until 1979. He moved to

Cornell Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...

's Laboratory for Nuclear Studies as a Senior Research Associate. He moved to

in 1991 and led the Experimental High Energy Physics Group at Syracuse from 1993 until his death in 2021. Since 2011, he served as the Distinguished Professor of Physics at Syracuse. He served as the CLEO physics analysis coordinator in 1988 and made significant contributions to data analysis and detector construction (such as the CLEO particle detectors at the electron storage ring at Cornell University. He served as co-spokesperson from 2007-2008. He also was co-spokesperson of the BTeV experiment at the

Fermilab Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics. Since 2007, Fermilab has been operat ...

from 1997 until it was terminated in 2005. He was a member of the Fermilab PAC, Board of Overseers, and Board of Directors. In 2005, Stone became a

LHCb The LHCb (Large Hadron Collider beauty) experiment is one of eight particle physics detector experiments collecting data at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. LHCb is a specialized b-physics experiment, designed primarily to measure the paramet ...

collaborator and served as the Upgrade coordinator from 2008-2011, during which time the project was organized and the letter of intent submitted. From 2011 to 2012, he was on leave from Syracuse as a scientific associate at

CERN The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in a northwestern suburb of Gene ...

. He died on October 6, 2021, at the age of 75.

Research

Stone had a leading role in many important discoveries such as the observation of the B⁺, B⁰, and D_s mesons. In 2000, he pushed to convert CLEO into a charm factory, which subsequently led to the measurement of the charm-decay constants f_D+ and f_Ds. These measurements demonstrated the applicability of lattice-QCD calculations of hadronic effects in the weak decays of hadrons with a heavy quark with precision of a few-percent, thereby enabling similar calculations to be used with confidence to interpret key measurements by other flavour-physics experiments worldwide. At CLEO, Stone led the design and construction of new high-performance Th-doped near-4π CsI calorimeter detectors. This was the first application of a precision electromagnetic calorimeter to a general-purpose magnetic spectrometer. He also worked on design and construction of a

Ring-imaging Cherenkov detector The ring-imaging Cherenkov, or RICH, detector is a device for identifying the type of an electrically charged subatomic particle of known momentum, that traverses a transparent refractive medium, by measurement of the presence and characteristics ...

providing four-σ K-π separation over the full accessible momentum range. In 2015, Stone was involved in the discovery of the

pentaquark A pentaquark is a human-made subatomic particle, consisting of four quarks and one antiquark bound together; they are not known to occur naturally, or exist outside of experiments specifically carried out to create them. As quarks have a baryon ...

. Five-quark resonances, called ''pentaquarks'', were predicted at the dawn of the quark model but were only found after 50 years when Stone and a small team of colleagues uncovered their existence in the LHCb dataset. In 2021, Stone was part of a LHCb team that unexpectedly discovered the exotic narrow double-charm tetraquark (T, cc), a type of long-lived

tetraquark A tetraquark, in particle physics, is an exotic meson composed of four valence quarks. A tetraquark state has long been suspected to be allowed by quantum chromodynamics, the modern theory of strong interactions. A tetraquark state is an examp ...

, in experiments conducted at the

Large Hadron Collider The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle collider. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008 in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and hundred ...

Awards

In 2019, Stone received the

Panofsky Prize The Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics is an annual prize of the American Physical Society. It is given to recognize and encourage outstanding achievements in experimental particle physics, and is open to scientists of any nation. It w ...

in Experimental Particle Physics of the APS for "transformative contributions to flavor physics and hadron spectroscopy, in particular through intellectual leadership on detector construction and analysis on the CLEO and Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiments, and for the long-standing, deeply influential advocacy for flavor physics at hadron colliders". He was elected a fellow of the

American Physical Society The American Physical Society (APS) is a not-for-profit membership organization of professionals in physics and related disciplines, comprising nearly fifty divisions, sections, and other units. Its mission is the advancement and diffusion of k ...

(APS) in 1993 for "outstanding contributions to the study of b-quark decays".

Works

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Stone, Sheldon Leslie 1946 births 2021 deaths People from Brooklyn 20th-century American physicists 21st-century American physicists Fellows of the American Physical Society American physicists Jewish American physicists People associated with CERN Brooklyn College alumni University of Rochester alumni Vanderbilt University faculty Cornell University faculty Syracuse University faculty