CANADIAN ASSOCIATION OF PHYSICISTS

ASSOCIATION CANADIENNE DES PHYSICIENS ET PHYSICIENNES

Ottawa, March 10, 2003 - The Canadian Association of Physicists (CAP) is pleased to announce that the 2003 Herzberg Medal is awarded to Michael E. Luke, University of Toronto, for his contributions to heavy quark effective field theory, including "Luke's theorem" which is important in the experimental analysis of heavy quark data.

Mike is a brilliant physicist who has made seminal contributions to elementary particle physics, and is clearly a star of his field at a young age. He is considered to be a foremost authority on heavy quark physics and is one of the most highly cited physicists in his field. His prominence as a creative scientist was established early on, beginning with his Ph.D. thesis work carried out at Harvard University. This work, which provided techniques used to make corrections to the basic heavy quark effective theories, is now a classic piece of research and is referred to as “Luke’s Theorem” in the literature.

Overall, Mike’s research has focused on the study of heavy quark decay, primarily through the use of effective Lagrangian techniques to model the weak and strong forces in the decay of hadrons containing at least one bottom (b) quark. He has made major contributions to almost all important theoretical developments in b physics over the last ten years. This is a subject of great current interest, particularly with the recent construction of two $500-million “B factories” at Stanford and Japan. Mike’s theoretical program is essential to most of the analyses at the B-factories, and is a crucial ingredient of the goal of constraining the Standard Model by making precision measurements of b decays. Studies of weak decay of B-mesons promises to shed light on fundamental questions such as the origin of CP violation, the structure of flavour changing interactions and the dynamics of strong interactions.

The CAP Herzberg Medal was first introduced in 1970 and is awarded annually. Dr. Luke will receive the 2003 Prize during the CAP's awards banquet to be held at the University of Prince Edward Island on June 10th, 2003.

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