British physicist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1950 for his development of the photographic method of studying nuclear processes and for the resulting discovery of the pion (pi-meson), a heavy subatomic particle. The pion proved to be the hypothetical particle proposed in 1935 by Yukawa Hideki of Japan in his theory of nuclear physics.

In 1928 Powell was appointed research assistant at the Henry Herbert Wills Physical Laboratory at the University of Bristol. He became professor of physics at Bristol in 1948 and director of the Wills Laboratory in 1964. Between 1939 and 1945 he developed the necessary techniques for using sensitive photographic emulsions to record the paths of cosmic rays. In plates exposed at the top of high mountains or sent up in high-altitude balloons, cosmic-ray interactions were recorded, and, in 1947, the data revealed the existence of the pion (π⁺) as well as the process whereby it decays into two other particles, an antimuon (mu-meson) and a neutrino. Powell also discovered the antipion (π⁻) and, in 1949, the modes of decay of kaons (K-mesons).