Simon van der Meer

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Simon van der Meer (left) with Queen Beatrix and Prince Claus , 1985.

Simon van der Meer (born November 24, 1925 in The Hague ; † March 4, 2011 in Geneva ) was a Dutch physicist .

Act

Van der Meer and Carlo Rubbia received in 1984 the physics - Nobel Prize "for their decisive contributions to the large project, the discovery of the field particles W and Z , intermediaries weak interaction has led." Van der Meer's contribution was to primarily think up and implement stochastic cooling .

From 1945 he studied technical physics at the Technical University of Delft , where he received his diploma in 1952. He then worked in the Philips research laboratories in Eindhoven until 1956 (mainly on electron microscopes) and switched to CERN while he was still in the founding phase , where he was employed until his retirement in 1990.

In the 1960s he was involved in neutrino experiments, where he implemented his own invention to increase the flow rate, and from 1965 on the second CERN experiment to measure the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon under Francis Farley (Francis James McDonald Farley), where he was under other developed the storage ring. According to his own statements, during the latter experiment he not only learned a lot about accelerator physics, but also about the “way of thinking and lifestyle” of the experimental high-energy physicists. After that he was mainly responsible for the power supply of the magnets at the ISR (Intersecting Storage Ring) and at the SPS-Synchrotron until the mid-1970s . In 1968 he also developed his first theoretical ideas for stochastic cooling while working at the ISR, which was further developed by others and applied in 1974 in the first experiments at the ISR. Stochastic cooling became important when Carlo Rubbia and others proposed the use of the SPS as a proton-antiproton collider. The preliminary experiments were successful and van der Meer, together with R. Billinge, became the project manager responsible for the accelerator design.

Along with Ernest Orlando Lawrence, Simon van der Meer is the only Nobel Prize winner to date for the physics of particle accelerators.

Van der Meer received the Duddell Medal from the Institute of Physics in 1982 and was honorary doctorate from the Universities of Geneva and Amsterdam . He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1984) and the Academia Europaea (1991) and corresponding member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences (1984).

He had been married since 1966 and had two children.

literature

Web links

Commons : Simon van der Meer  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ volkskrant.nl: Nobelprijswinnaar Van der Meer overleden
  2. ^ Van der Meer autobiographical note on the Nobel website
personal data
SURNAME Meer, Simon van der
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Dutch physicist
DATE OF BIRTH November 24, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH The hague
DATE OF DEATH March 4, 2011
Place of death Geneva