Neville Robinson

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Neville Robinson. British physicist (1925–1996).

Neville Robinson was born in Cambridge. He was educated at The Leys School and Christ's College, Cambridge where he read Physics.

With Jim Daniels and Michael Grace, he produced an example of nuclear orientation for the first time. Then in 1951 in the first nuclear cooling experiment, he produced the lowest temperature ever achieved until then at only ten millionths of a degree above absolute zero.

He was a Faculty Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford from 1957 to 1962, immediately followed by becoming a founding Fellow of St. Catherine's College, Oxford where he stayed until his retirement in 1992. He worked at the Clarendon Laboratory during his time at Oxford University. During his career, he visited Bell Telephone Laboratories in the United States three times while on sabbatical leave.

In 1973, Robinson published the book Macroscopic Electromagnetism, a standard text. His paper Microwave shot noise and minimum noise factor was awarded the Clerk Maxwell Prize by the British Institute of Radio Engineers. Importantly, he invented the Robinson oscillator in the field of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR), which now forms the underlying basis of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) systems used in many hospitals.

Robinson's son is the author Andrew Robinson.