Hugh Muirhead (1925 – 19 January 2007) was a Britishnuclear physicist and the last surviving author of the scientific paper announcing the discovery of thepion, a particle predicted byHideki Yukawa.[1]
Muirhead did his PhD studies at theUniversity of Bristol, where he,César Lattes andGiuseppe Occhialini, were part ofCecil Powell'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 journalNature and published the same year. In 1950, Powell was awarded theNobel Prize for the discovery.[1][2][3]
After gaining his PhD, Muirhead moved to theUniversity of Glasgow and then theUniversity of Liverpool in 1957, where he spent the rest of his career. Under his direction at Liverpool, it was experimentally confirmed thatparity was violated inmuon capture. He became a world authority onantiproton physics. As well as dozens of scientific papers, his textbooks includeThe Physics of Elementary Particles andNotes 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 theRutherford Appleton Laboratory. In the 1980s, he joined theUA1 group atCERN, led byCarlo Rubbia andAlan Astbury, studying proton-antiproton collisions; Astbury had been Muirhead's former student at Liverpool. Their work led to a Nobel Prize for Rubbia andSimon van der Meer.[1][4][5]
Muirhead died aged 81, survived by his wife, Jean, and three children.[1]
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