2025 Medal Winners | francais

The 2025 CAP/DCMMP Brockhouse Medal

is awarded to

Peter Grutter

"I am honoured and grateful to receive the 2025 Brockhouse Medal. A big thank you to the inspiring and brilliant students, postdocs and collaborators I have had the fun to work with over the years. I deeply appreciate the intellectual energy of Canada’s dynamic research community and the funding provided by the Canadian taxpayers." winner quote

The Canadian Association of Physicists (CAP) is pleased to announce that the 2025 CAP/DCMMP Brockhouse Medal is awarded to Peter Grutter, McGill University, in recognition of his impactful contributions to experimental research in several areas of condensed matter and materials physics, surface science, biophysics, and nanotechnology and, in particular, for his pioneering work on force microscopy detection methods. announcement

Grutter has made significant contributions to the development of atomic force microscopy (AFM) methods to measure properties simultaneously with structure on a nanometer length scale. He pioneered and helped establish the field of Magnetic Force Microscopy (MFM), with substantial impact in science as well as the hard disk industry. To improve sensitivity of MFM, together with collaborators at IBM he developed frequency detection methods to operate AFMs in vacuum. This technique is key to the imaging of surfaces including insulators and molecules with atomic resolution. This team also established the fundamental thermal as well as backaction limits on force detection.

At McGill, Grutter and his team developed methods of single electron spectroscopy using AFM. AFM is used as a scannable gate and at the same time a local detector with single electron sensitivity. His team measured Coulomb blockade energies, quantum mechanical energy levels as well as the strong and weak coupling between individual quantum dots. More recently, this method was used to directly observe Franck-Condon blockade in a single molecule, allowing electron-phonon coupling strengths, molecular reorganization energies as well as vibration energies to be determined via a force measurement.

Time resolution is important to understand many phenomena. Grutter’s group established that it is only the thermal limits of energy resolution in AFM that determines how fast a signal one can detect. Using pump-probe techniques well-known from ultra-fast optics, the Grutter group demonstrated 100fs time resolution by AFM by measuring the optical autocorrelation of a ultrafast laser pulse impinging on LiNbO3 and MoSe2. Furthermore, non-linear optical properties were measured via force detection with high spatial resolution.

Grutter has a huge impact on the training of the next generation of scientists. His mentees have gone on to impactful careers in academia, industry (including several successful start-ups) and government. nominator citation

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