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Simon van der Meer (born November 24, 1925, The Hague, The Netherlands) is a Dutch accelerator physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1984 for his contributions to the project which led to the discovery of the W and Z particles at CERN.
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Simon van der Meer was born and grew up in The Hague, finishing his secondary education during the German occupation of the Netherlands. He studied Technical Physics at the Delft University of Technology, and received an engineer's degree in 1952. After worked for Philips for a few years, in 1956 he joined CERN, where he stayed until his retirement in 1990.
He married Catharina M. Koopman in the mid-1960's; they have two children.
Van der Meer invented the technique of stochastic cooling of particle beams. This technique was used to accumulate intense beams of protons and antiprotons in the Super Proton Synchrotron at CERN, which allowed the UA1 experiment, led by Carlo Rubbia, to produce W and Z bosons through 500 GeV proton-antiproton collisions in early 1983. 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 for their decisive contributions to the project.
Van der Meer and Ernest Lawrence are the only two accelerator physicists awarded with the Nobel prize.