Sheldon Stone

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

Stone began his career as an assistant professor of physics in 1973 at Vanderbilt University, where he stayed until 1979. He moved to Cornell's Laboratory for Nuclear Studies as a senior research associate. He moved to Syracuse University 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 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 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. He died on October 6, 2021, at the age of 75.

In 2015, Stone was involved in the discovery of the pentaquark at CERN. 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, in experiments conducted at the Large Hadron Collider.

Awards In 2019, Stone received the Panofsky Prize 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 (APS) in 1993 for "outstanding contributions to the study of b-quark decays".

Works