The experimental physicist Mike Pendlebury, who has died aged 78, loved building equipment, making precision measurements and understanding their theoretical relevance. A founding member in 1962 of the faculty at the University of Sussex, he worked there for 50 years and was an early enthusiast for the use of new technology in general, and of computers for research and teaching in particular.
At an early stage his Sussex research group transferred its expertise from atomic beams to neutrons, basic constituents of the nucleus that have no electric charge but do possess a magnetic moment. Norman Ramsey of Harvard University, a future Nobel laureate with whom Mike collaborated extensively, had suggested in 1950 that neutrons might also have an electric dipole moment (EDM), corresponding to the separation of positive and negative charges within an overall neutral system (analogous to the separation of north and south poles in magnetism).
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