Affiliation:
1. Experimental Physics DivisionCERN, 1211 Geneva 23Switzerland
Abstract
Alan Marmaduke Wetherell was a physicist of repute. During his career he excelled in the practice of his profession. As a research student he showed great promise at the University of Liverpool, where he conducted his doctoral work in the group of Professor James Macdonald Cassels from 1954 to 1957. He went on to write his thesis on the ratio of radiative to mesic capture of stopped negative pions by hydrogen. He continued in his research group doing experiments on polarized muon beams and on the radiative β-decay of the pion. In 1957 he was awarded a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship, which he used to visit the California Institute of Technology, where he worked on the photoproduction of kaons and pions. In 1959 he moved from California to Switzerland, where he joined the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). He rose to become a senior research physicist in 1963 and was appointed the Division Leader of the Experimental Physics Division in 1981-84. He retired from the CERN staff in December 1997.