CANADIAN ASSOCIATION OF PHYSICISTS

ASSOCIATION CANADIENNE DES PHYSICIENS ET PHYSICIENNES

Ottawa, April 24th, 1998 - The Canadian Association of Physicists (CAP) is pleased to announce that the 1998 CAP Herzberg Medal for outstanding achievement by a physicist under the age of 40 will be awarded to Dr. Louis Taillefer, Associate Professor of Physics at McGill, for his internationally recognized studies of heavy-fermion metals and high temperature superconductors.

Dr. Taillefer combines two essential ingredients for successful metals physics research: he has an unusual talent for producing single crystal samples of the highest purity and perfection, and he is a master of a battery of sophisticated experiment techniques. Some of these techniques utilize the in-house, low temperature facilities that he has built at McGill, and others involve collaborations at major facilities such as neutron beam facilities and synchrotrons.

Louis Taillefer's distinctive research style is well illustrated by his postdoctoral research at Cambridge. In response to a challenge that he faced in this research, Louis Taillefer grew the world's best UPt3 crystals, using a technique that he had developed as a Ph.D. student, and then performed difficult low temperature measurements of the largest cyclotron masses ever observed in a metal. His study, which was the first and is still the most complete study of a heavy-fermion system, remains a classic in the field.

More recently, he has been using het conduction as a probe of electron behaviour in heavy-fermion and high-temperature superconductors, shedding light on the nature of the excitation spectrum and on current theories of transport in unconventional superconductors.

Dr. Taillefer received his B.Sc. (Honours) from McGill in 1982 and his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1986. In Cambridge, he was a Research Fellow of Jesus College and spent over a year working as an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Cavendish Laboratory. In 1987, he went to Grenoble, France to work in the CNRS Laboratories, first as a postdoctoral associate and then as a Research Scientist at the Laboratoire Louis-Néel. Dr. Taillefer returned to Canada in 1992 to join the Department of Physics at McGill and the Superconductivity Program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

In 1993, Dr. Taillefer was awarded a Research Fellowship by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and he will receive an NSERC Steacie Fellowship on April 27^th, 1998.

The CAP Herzberg Medal was first introduced in 1970 and is awarded annually. The 1998 Medal will be presented to Dr. Taillefer during the CAP's awards banquet to be held at the University of Waterloo on 1998 June 16.

The Canadian Association of Physicists, founded in 1945, is a professional association representing over 1600 individual physicists and physics students in Canada, the U.S. and overseas, as well as a number of Corporate and Departmental Members. In addition to its learned activities, the CAP also undertakes a number of activities intended to encourage students to pursue a career in physics.

For more information, please contact:

Canadian Association of Physicists
Tel: (613) 562-5614
Fax: (613) 562-5615
E-mail: cap@physics.uottawa.ca