Simon van der Meer (24 November 19254 March 2011) was a Dutch particle accelerator physicist who shared the

Nobel Prize in Physics The Nobel Prize in Physics () is an annual award given by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for those who have made the most outstanding contributions to mankind in the field of physics. It is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the ...

in 1984 with Carlo Rubbia for contributions to the

CERN The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in Meyrin, western suburb of Gene ...

project which led to the discovery of the W and Z particles, the two fundamental communicators of the weak interaction.

Biography

One of four children, Simon van der Meer was born and grew up in

The Hague The Hague ( ) is the capital city of the South Holland province of the Netherlands. With a population of over half a million, it is the third-largest city in the Netherlands. Situated on the west coast facing the North Sea, The Hague is the c ...

, the Netherlands, in a family of teachers. He was educated at the city's gymnasium, graduating in 1943 during the German occupation of the Netherlands. He studied Technical Physics at the

Delft University of Technology The Delft University of Technology (TU Delft; ) is the oldest and largest Dutch public university, public Institute of technology, technical university, located in Delft, Netherlands. It specializes in engineering, technology, computing, design, a ...

, and received an

engineer's degree An engineer's degree is an advanced academic degree in engineering which is conferred in Europe, some countries of Asia and Latin America, North Africa and a few institutions in the United States. The degree may require a thesis but always require ...

in 1952. After working for Philips Research in

Eindhoven Eindhoven ( ; ) is a city and List of municipalities of the Netherlands, municipality of the Netherlands, located in the southern Provinces of the Netherlands, province of North Brabant, of which it is the largest municipality, and is also locat ...

on high-voltage equipment for electron microscopy for a few years, he joined

in 1956 where he stayed until his retirement in 1990. Van der Meer was a relative of Nobel Prize winner

Tjalling Koopmans Tjalling Charles Koopmans (August 28, 1910 – February 26, 1985) was a Dutch-American mathematician and economist. He was the joint winner with Leonid Kantorovich of the 1975 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on the theory ...

– they were first cousins once removed. In the mid-1960s, Van der Meer married Catharina M. Koopman; they had a daughter and a son.

Work at CERN

In the 1950s, Van der Meer designed magnets for the 28 GeV

Proton Synchrotron The Proton Synchrotron (PS, sometimes also referred to as CPS) is a particle accelerator at CERN. It is CERN's first synchrotron, beginning its operation in 1959. For a brief period the PS was the world's highest energy particle accelerator. It ...

(PS) In 1961, he invented a pulsed focusing device, known as the ‘ Van der Meer horn’. Such devices are necessary for long-base-line neutrino facilities and are used even today. That was followed in the 1960s by the design of a small storage ring for a physics experiment studying the anomalous magnetic moment of the

muon A muon ( ; from the Greek letter mu (μ) used to represent it) is an elementary particle similar to the electron, with an electric charge of −1 '' e'' and a spin of ''ħ'', but with a much greater mass. It is classified as a ...

. Soon after and in the following decade, Van der Meer did some very innovative work on the regulation and control of power supplies for the

Intersecting Storage Rings The ISR (standing for "Intersecting Storage Rings") was a particle accelerator at CERN. It was the world's first hadron collider, and ran from 1971 to 1984, with a maximum center of mass energy of 62 GeV. From its initial startup, the collider ...

(ISR) and, later, the SPS. Van der Meer's ISR Collider days in the 1970s led to his technique for luminosity calibration of colliding beams, first used at the ISR and still used today at the

LHC The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008, in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists, and ...

, as well as in other colliders. The Nobel Prize committee recognised Van der Meer's idea of stochastic cooling and its application at CERN in the late 1970s and 1980s, specifically in the Antiproton Accumulator, which supplied

antiproton The antiproton, , (pronounced ''p-bar'') is the antiparticle of the proton. Antiprotons are stable, but they are typically short-lived, since any collision with a proton will cause both particles to be annihilated in a burst of energy. The exis ...

s to the Proton-Antiproton Collider. During his work at the ISR, Van der Meer developed a technique using steering magnets to vertically displace the two colliding beams with respect to each other; this permitted the evaluation of the effective beam height, leading to an evaluation of the beam luminosity at an intersection point. The famous ‘Van der Meer scans’ are indispensable even today in the LHC experiments; without these, the precision of the calibration of the luminosity at the intersection points in the Collider would be much lower . For the new SPS machine constructed in the early seventies, he proposed that the generation of the reference voltages for the bending and quadrupole supplies should be based on measurements of the field along the cycle, and gave an outline of the correction algorithms. His proposal resulted in the first ever computer-controlled closed-loop system for a geographically distributed system, as the 7 km circumference SPS was; this was a no simple feat for the early 1970s. Measurements of the main magnet currents were introduced only later, when the SPS had to run as a storage ring for the SPS p–pbar collider. Van der Meer's accelerator knowledge and

computer program A computer program is a sequence or set of instructions in a programming language for a computer to Execution (computing), execute. It is one component of software, which also includes software documentation, documentation and other intangibl ...

ming meant he developed very sophisticated applications and tools to control the antiproton source accelerators as well as the transfer of antiprotons to the SPS Collider for Nobel-winning discoveries. The AA and AC pbar source complex machines remained from 1987 to 1996 the most highly automated set of machines in CERN's repertoire of accelerators.

Nobel prize

Van der Meer invented the technique of stochastic cooling of particle beams. His technique was used to accumulate intense beams of

s for head-on collision with counter-rotating

proton A proton is a stable subatomic particle, symbol , Hydron (chemistry), H+, or 1H+ with a positive electric charge of +1 ''e'' (elementary charge). Its mass is slightly less than the mass of a neutron and approximately times the mass of an e ...

beams at 540 GeV centre-of-mass energy or 270 GeV per beam in the

Super Proton Synchrotron The Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) is a particle accelerator of the synchrotron type at CERN. It is housed in a circular tunnel, in circumference, straddling the border of France and Switzerland near Geneva, Switzerland. History The SPS was d ...

. Such collisions produced

W and Z bosons In particle physics, the W and Z bosons are vector bosons that are together known as the weak bosons or more generally as the intermediate vector bosons. These elementary particles mediate the weak interaction; the respective symbols are , , an ...

which could be detected for the first time in 1983 by the UA1 experiment, led by Carlo Rubbia. The W and Z bosons had been theoretically predicted some years earlier, and their experimental discovery was considered a significant success for CERN. Van der Meer and Rubbia shared the 1984

Nobel Prize The Nobel Prizes ( ; ; ) are awards administered by the Nobel Foundation and granted in accordance with the principle of "for the greatest benefit to humankind". The prizes were first awarded in 1901, marking the fifth anniversary of Alfred N ...

for their decisive contributions to the project. Van der Meer and

Ernest Lawrence Ernest Orlando Lawrence (August 8, 1901 – August 27, 1958) was an American accelerator physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939 for his invention of the cyclotron. He is known for his work on uranium-isotope separation for ...

are the only two accelerator physicists who have won the Nobel prize. Apart from his Nobel Prize, Van der Meer also became a member of the

Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (, KNAW) is an organization dedicated to the advancement of science and literature in the Netherlands. The academy is housed in the Trippenhuis in Amsterdam. In addition to various advisory a ...

in 1984.

References

External links

* including the Nobel Lecture, 8 December 1984 ''Stochastic Cooling and the Accumulation of Antiprotons''
CERN pays tribute to Simon van der Meer
* {{DEFAULTSORT:van der Meer, Simon 1925 births 2011 deaths Accelerator physicists People associated with CERN Delft University of Technology alumni 20th-century Dutch inventors Dutch Nobel laureates 20th-century Dutch physicists Experimental physicists Members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Nobel laureates in Physics Particle physicists Scientists from The Hague