David Bailin obituary

My father, David Bailin, who has died aged 79, was a physicist who was ahead of his time. His best known work was on superconductivity and superfluidity in relativistic fermion systems, inspired by his former Sussex colleague Tony Leggett's Nobel prizewinning work on superfluid Helium-3. It gained no citations for the first few years, until its importance for neutron stars was understood.

His early research was on the weak interaction - the fundamental force behind certain kinds of radioactivity. He showed that the experimental data at the time required the existence of a heavy W boson particle, which was discovered 20 years later.