Hugh Muirhead (1925 – 19 January 2007) was a British
nuclear physicist
Nuclear physics is the field of physics that studies atomic nuclei and their constituents and interactions, in addition to the study of other forms of nuclear matter.
Nuclear physics should not be confused with atomic physics, which studies the ...
and the last surviving author of the scientific paper announcing the discovery of the
pion, a particle predicted by
Hideki Yukawa.
Muirhead did his PhD studies at the
University of Bristol, where he,
César Lattes and
Giuseppe Occhialini, were part of
Cecil Powell
Cecil Frank Powell, FRS (5 December 1903 – 9 August 1969) was a British physicist, and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate for heading the team that developed the photographic method of studying nuclear processes and for the resulting discovery of ...
's group trying to confirm the existence of pions. Evidence was eventually found on 7 March 1947 by two of the group's technical team, Marietta Kurz and Irene Roberts. A paper was submitted to the journal ''
Nature'' and published the same year. In 1950, Powell was awarded the
Nobel Prize for the discovery.
After gaining his PhD, Muirhead moved to the
University of Glasgow and then the
University of Liverpool in 1957, where he spent the rest of his career. Under his direction at Liverpool, it was experimentally confirmed that
parity
Parity may refer to:
* Parity (computing)
** Parity bit in computing, sets the parity of data for the purpose of error detection
** Parity flag in computing, indicates if the number of set bits is odd or even in the binary representation of the r ...
was violated in
muon capture. He became a world authority on
antiproton physics. As well as dozens of scientific papers, his textbooks include ''The Physics of Elementary Particles'' and ''Notes on Elementary Particle Physics'' (based on a series of his series of lectures), running into many editions. In 1973 and 1974, he ran summer schools for high-energy physics students at the
Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. In the 1980s, he joined the
UA1 group 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 ...
, led by
Carlo Rubbia and
Alan Astbury, studying proton-antiproton collisions; Astbury had been Muirhead's former student at Liverpool. Their work led to a Nobel Prize for Rubbia and
Simon van der Meer.
Muirhead died aged 81, survived by his wife, Jean, and three children.
Books published
* ''The Physics of Elementary Particles'', Oxford/New York, Pergamon Press. (1965)
* ''Notes on Elementary Particle Physics'', Oxford/New York, Pergamon Press. (1971)
* ''The Special Theory of Relativity'', New York, Wiley. (1973)
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Muirhead, Hugh
1925 births
2007 deaths
British nuclear physicists
Alumni of the University of Bristol