Bernard French, a CERN physicist who worked on and led numerous experiments, especially at the OMEGA spectrometer, died on 5 November 2025 at the age of 94. Bernard was born in Watford in the UK on 23 April 1931 and gained his PhD at Imperial College London in 1958, staying there as a research fellow before joining CERN as an associate on 1 October 1961. After becoming a staff member on 1 May 1962, he remained at CERN until his retirement in 1996.
Bernard first worked on the analysis of bubble-chamber data, focusing on the search and study of meson resonances. Then, in 1967, he joined a group proposing the OMEGA spectrometer. Conceived as an electronic bubble chamber, OMEGA offered a large magnetic volume, initially filled with spark chambers and later with wire chambers, operating with a variety of triggers and incident beams in the West Area experimental hall. The group included physicists Aldo Michelini, Emanuele Quercigh and Werner Beusch, with technical coordinator Otto Gildemeister and Mario Morpurgo – who designed the superconducting magnet. OMEGA recorded its first collisions in 1972 and ran until the end of 1996. Bernard contributed to many of the experiments performed at the spectrometer, first using beams from the PS and later from the SPS.
Bernard was known by his colleagues for his ability to do back-of-the-envelope calculations that were often better than the final calculations, as well as his remarkable pattern-recognition ability – he always claimed that if he couldn’t resolve the tracks by eye, no computer was ever going to do it! He was also known for his large collection of old cars and his lovely house on the lake, complete with a small jetty. Bernard would often be seen in the CERN canteen, even in his 90s, and his insatiable enthusiasm for physics continued until the end.
