In this article, Dutch capitalization is used fortussenvoegsels inDutch family names. The first letter in Van der Meer is capitalized unless it is preceded by a name, initial or title of nobility.
One of four children, Simon van der Meer was born and grew up inThe Hague, the Netherlands, in a family of teachers.[3] He was educated at the city'sgymnasium, graduating in 1943 during the German occupation of the Netherlands. He studied Technical Physics at theDelft University of Technology, and received anengineer's degree in 1952. After working forPhilips Research inEindhoven on high-voltage equipment for electron microscopy for a few years, he joinedCERN in 1956 where he stayed until his retirement in 1990.[4][5][6]
Van der Meer was a relative of Nobel Prize winnerTjalling Koopmans – they werefirst cousins once removed.[7][8] In the mid-1960s, Van der Meer married Catharina M. Koopman; they had a daughter and a son.
In the 1950s, Van der Meer designed magnets for the 28 GeVProton Synchrotron (PS)[9][10] 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.[11]
That was followed in the 1960s by the design of a small storage ring for a physics experiment studying the anomalous magnetic moment of themuon. Soon after and in the following decade, Van der Meer did some very innovative work on the regulation and control of power supplies for theIntersecting Storage Rings (ISR) and, later, theSPS.[citation needed]
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 theLHC, as well as in other colliders.[citation needed]
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[12].[citation needed]
For the newSPS 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.[citation needed]
Van der Meer's accelerator knowledge andcomputer programming 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.[13]
Van der Meer invented the technique ofstochastic cooling of particle beams.[14] His technique was used to accumulate intense beams ofantiprotons for head-on collision with counter-rotatingproton beams at 540 GeV centre-of-mass energy or 270 GeV per beam in theSuper Proton Synchrotron atCERN. Such collisions producedW and Z bosons which could be detected for the first time in 1983 by theUA1 experiment, led byCarlo 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 1984Nobel Prize for their decisive contributions to the project.[15]
Van der Meer andErnest Lawrence are the only two accelerator physicists who have won the Nobel prize.[16]
^D.Th. Kuiper (2002).Tussen observatie en participatie: twee eeuwen gereformeerde en antirevolutionaire wereld in ontwikkelingsperspectief (in Dutch). Uitgeverij Verloren.ISBN90-6550-694-2.
