A. Douglas Stone

A. Douglas Stone is Carl A. Morse Professor of Applied Physics, and Professor of Physics at Yale University. At Yale he has served as Chair of Applied Physics, Director of Yale’s Division of Physical Sciences, and currently is Deputy Director of the Yale Quantum Institute.

Stone is a theoretical physicist whose early research was in condensed matter physics and for the past two decades has focused on optical physics. He has co-authored over 170 research publications, which have been cited over 30,000 times. He was a pioneer in the field of mesoscopic condensed matter physics, co-discovering, with Patrick Lee, the phenomenon of Universal Conductance Fluctuations. He has worked on the effects of chaos in quantum and electromagnetic systems and was the first to propose and study lasers with ray-chaotic resonators. His current work is on lasers, nonlinear optics and non-hermitian physics in systems with complex geometries. He and his colleague Hui Cao were awarded the 2015 Willis Lamb Medal for Laser Science for their work on random and chaotic lasers. His group developed Steady-state Ab initio Laser Theory (SALT) and in 2010 he pioneered the concept of a Coherent Perfect Absorber (a time-reversed or “anti-laser”). Recently his group generalized this framework to encompass a general theory of reflectionless scattering of electromagnetic and matter waves. He is a Fellow of Optica and the American Physical Society, an Honorary Member of the Aspen Center for Physics, and Chair-Elect of the APS Forum on History and Philosophy of Science.

Stone earned his BA from Harvard, an MA from Balliol College, Oxford (where he was a Rhodes Scholar), and a PhD from MIT in 1983 under the supervision of John Joannopoulos. His popular science book, Einstein and the Quantum, was selected as science book of the year in 2013 by NPR and received the Phi Beta Kappa science book award in 2014.

In 2025, he received the Max Born Award, “For pioneering concepts of coherent perfect absorption and reflectionless scattering modes, comprising a general theory of reflectionless scattering in optics, and for seminal contributions to laser theory of complex microcavities.”