Donald Hill Perkins

Donald Hill Perkins CBE FRS (15 October 1925 – 30 October 2022) was a British physicist and an emeritus professor at the University of Oxford. He achieved great success in the field of particle physics and was also known for his books.^[1]

Don Perkins
Born	Donald Hill Perkins 15 October 1925 Kingston upon Hull, England
Died	30 October 2022

Personal life and education

Perkins was born in 1925 to Gertrude and George Perkins, both school teachers. He was educated at Imperial College London, and in 1945 he received his B.Sc. and in 1948, a Ph.D. He married Dorothy Maloney in 1955 in they had two daughters.^[2]

Career

From 1949 he worked at Bristol University and in 1955/56 at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley. In 1956 he received the post of reader in Bristol University. In 1963/64 he conducted research at CERN. In 1965 he became Oxford professor of elementary particle physics. There, under the leadership of Denys Wilkinson, he built, along with Ken W. Allen, the new Department of Nuclear Physics. In 1976/77 and 1983/84 he returned to CERN on sabbatical leave.

In 1998 he retired and became Emeritus Fellow of St Catherine's College, Oxford.

Achievements

Perkins' earliest achievements include the discovery of the negative pion in cosmic radiation.^[3][4] At Berkeley, he worked with accelerators on K-mesons and the annihilation of protons and antiprotons, at CERN in neutrino scattering experiments.

Perkins made important pioneering discoveries in regard to the weak neutral current (Gargamelle experiment) and the experimental verification of quantum chromodynamics. In 1982 he explored the possible proton decay, and found a first indication of neutrino oscillations.

Perkins together with Peter Fowler first suggested the use of pion beams as a cancer therapy in a Nature article in 1961.^[5]

Perkins in 1959 published his first textbook, together with C.F. Powell and Peter Fowler, on the theme of the emulsion technique applied to cosmic rays, nuclear, and particle physics. His Introduction to High Energy Physics is a global standard work on particle physics. In 2003 he published Particle Astrophysics.

Perkins died on 30 October 2022, at the age of 97.^[2]

Awards

Perkins was awarded honorary doctorates in Bristol and the University of Sheffield. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1966. In 1979 he received the Guthrie Medal and Prize of the Institute of Physics, in 1992 the Holweck Prize of the Société Française de Physique, in 1997, the Royal Medal of the Royal Society^[6] and in 2001 the High Energy and Particle Physics Prize of the European Physical Society. He gave numerous guest lectures at universities in Toronto, Seattle, Chicago, Hawaii and Victoria and the 2004 Wolfgang Paul Lecture in Bonn.

External links

• Scientific publications of Donald Hill Perkins on INSPIRE-HEP
• (in German). 2004. Archived from the original on 11 June 2007. (short biography on the occasion of the Wolfgang-Paul-Lecture at the University of Bonn)

References

1. "Donald Hill Perkins 1925–2022". CERN Courier. 9 November 2022. Retrieved 25 January 2023.
2. Close, Frank (22 November 2022). "Donald Perkins obituary". The Guardian. Retrieved 23 November 2022.
3. "Marietta Blau, considered Perkins to have discovered the negative pion and Powell’s team to have discovered the positive pion." C. L. Vieria, A. A. P Videira (2014). "Cesar Lattes, Nuclear Emulsions, and the Discovery of the Pi-meson". Physics in Perspective. 16: 2–36. doi:10.1007/s00016-014-0128-6. S2CID 122718292.
4. D. H. Perkins (1947). "Nuclear Disintegration by Meson Capture". Nature. 159 (4030): 126–127. doi:10.1038/159126a0. PMID 20281237. S2CID 4107188.
5. Fowler, P. H.; Perkins, D. H. (February 1961). "The Possibility of Therapeutic Applications of Beams of Negative π-Mesons". Nature. 189 (4764): 524–528. Bibcode:1961Natur.189..524F. doi:10.1038/189524a0. PMID 13701079. S2CID 4293830.
6. "Royal Society: Fellows Directory Donald H. Perkins, Royal Medal 1997". Retrieved 14 February 2018.