Simon van der Meer, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1984 for a technological advance that was crucial to the discovery of fundamental building blocks of the universe, died March 4 in Geneva. He was 85.

His death was announced by CERN, the particle physics laboratory in Switzerland where he worked for more than 30 years.

In the 1980s, physicists were looking to fill in missing elementary particles predicted by their so-called Standard Model, the suite of theories that has ruled particle physics for a generation and explains all the forces of nature except gravity. To find them, however, researchers needed collisions more energetic than what could be produced by particle accelerators.

Mr. van der Meer’s advance was finding a way to generate intense beams of a particular particle, antiprotons, that were needed for the experiments. By slamming antiprotons and protons together, physicists achieved higher-energy collisions that revealed constituents of the universe never before seen.