Scientific Work
Van der Meer invented the technique of stochastic cooling of particle beams. His technique was used to accumulate intense beams of antiprotons for head-on collision with counter-rotating proton beams at 500 GeV in the Super Proton Synchrotron at CERN. Such collisions produced W and Z bosons which could be detected for the first time in 1983 by the UA1 experiment, led by Carlo 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 1984 Nobel Prize for their decisive contributions to the project.
Van der Meer and Ernest Lawrence are the only two accelerator physicists who have won the Nobel prize.
Read more about this topic: Simon Van Der Meer
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