Simon van der Meer

Physicist and engineer, born in The Hague, W Netherlands. He studied at the Technical University, Delft, and worked at the Philips research laboratories in Eindhoven (1952–5) before becoming senior engineer for CERN, Geneva (1956–90). He devised a method of particle beam focusing that was vital to the discovery of W and Z particles. He shared the 1984 Nobel Prize for Physics with Carlo Rubbia.

Simon van der Meer (born November 24, 1925, The Hague) is a Dutch accelerator physicist who invented the concept of stochastic cooling in colliders, making possible the discovery of the W particle and the Z particle at the CERN 500 Gev proton-antiproton collider by the UA-1 experimental collaboration led by Carlo Rubbia.