Simon van der Meer

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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. As a result van der Meer and Rubbia shared the 1984 Nobel Prize in Physics.

In 1952 van der Meer received an engineer's degree in Technical Physics from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. He worked for Philips until 1956, when he joined CERN as staff until his retirement in 1990.

Simon van der Meer together with Ernest Orlando Lawrence are the only two accelerator physicists awarded with the Nobel prize.

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