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Name of creator

Yves Goldschmidt-Clermont (1922-1988)

Biographical history

A graduate of the Université libre in Brussels, Yves Goldschmidt-Clermont started his career in 1947 at the Collège de France under Professor F. Joliot-Curie.

In 1947 he studied at H. H. Wills Physics Laboratory in Bristol with Professors C.F. Powell and G.P.S. Occhialini, working on the measurement of masses by multiple scattering.

In 1950-1951 he went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to study neutral pion photoproduction in hydrogen in a pioneer experiment using emulsions.

In 1953 he joined CERN in the STS division (newly created and set up by Lew Kowarski) responsible for making technical and scientific equipment. He worked on the development of the first instruments for measuring photographs and finally the Hough Powell Device (HPD).

In 1963 he began to specialize in bubble chamber experiments. He concentrated on the systematic study of strange resonances using positive kaon beams at increasingly higher energies in ever-bigger chambers. In his last experiment at BEBC, he discovered an abnormal production of soft photons. To study this he turned his hand to electronics, and proposed the Sophie experiment at the Omega spectrometer.

For many years, he coordinated CERN’s collaboration with Soviet laboratories. From 1979 to 1981 he was secretary of the Research Board. From 1983 to 1984 he was Deputy Leader of EP Division. Yves Goldschmidt-Clermont died in a skiing accident in February 1988.

Source : CERN courier Vol. 28 N°3, April 1988

Immediate source of acquisition or transfer

Received from the Experimental Physics (EP) Division, November 1988