Donald Hill Perkins

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Don Perkins
Born
Donald Hill Perkins

15 October 1925
Kingston upon Hull, England
Died30 October 2022

Donald Hill Perkins

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]

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

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

K-mesons and the annihilation of protons and antiprotons, at CERN in neutrino
scattering experiments.

Perkins made important pioneering discoveries in regard to the

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

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
  • "Donald Perkins" (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. ^ a b Close, Frank (22 November 2022). "Donald Perkins obituary". The Guardian. Retrieved 23 November 2022.
  3. S2CID 122718292
    .
  4. S2CID 4107188
    .
  5. S2CID 4293830
    .
  6. ^ "Royal Society: Fellows Directory Donald H. Perkins, Royal Medal 1997". Retrieved 14 February 2018.
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