Cecil Powell
Facts
Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive.
Cecil Frank Powell
The Nobel Prize in Physics 1950
Born: 5 December 1903, Tonbridge, United Kingdom
Died: 9 August 1969, Italy
Affiliation at the time of the award: Bristol University, Bristol, United Kingdom
Prize motivation: “for his development of the photographic method of studying nuclear processes and his discoveries regarding mesons made with this method”
Prize share: 1/1
Work
Charged particles moving through photographic emulsions leave tracks that can be examined in the images developed afterward. Cecil Powell made improvements to this technique in order to study radiation and nuclear reactions. In 1947 he discovered that incident cosmic ray particles could react with atomic nuclei in the emulsion, creating other, short-lived particles. These particles turned out to be pi-mesons, the particles proposed by Yukawa as mediating the strong force binding protons and neutrons in nuclei.
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