After working for Philips Research in Eindhoven on high-voltage equipment for electron microscopy for a few years, he joined CERN in 1956 where he stayed until his retirement in 1990.
Soon after and in the following decade, Van der Meer did some very innovative work on the regulation and control of power supplies for the Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR) and, later, the SPS.
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 new SPS 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.
[16] Apart from his Nobel Prize, Van der Meer also became a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1984.