2014 Medal Winners | francais

PRESS RELEASE / FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The 2014 CAP/DCMMP Brockhouse Medal

is awarded to

Ian Affleck

"I feel very honoured that our interdisciplinary research is being recognized by the Brockhouse Medal for advances in condensed matter and materials physics." winner quote

The Canadian Association of Physicists (CAP) is pleased to announce that the 2014 CAP/DCMMP Brockhouse Medal is awarded to Ian Affleck, University of British Columbia, in recognition of for his original and influential contributions to the theory of condensed matter systems, particularly in the application of conformal field theory techniques to the Kondo effects and quantum impurity problems and advances in the theory of quantum magnetism in low dimensions. announcement

Ian Affleck has been an international leader in developing the theory of strongly correlated systems for over 25 years. He has helped to introduce several important theoretical techniques and concepts into the field while also directly interpreting and inspiring experimental work.

His early work on the theory of high-Tc superconductivity introduced the large-N approximation into the study of the Hubbard model, leading to the prediction of two novel phases with spontaneous orbital currents and bond-centered charge density waves as well as introducing the now-popular concept of effective gauge symmetry.

The Affleck-Kennedy-Lieb-Tasaki (AKLT) models are a set of exactly solvable Hamiltonians for antiferromagnets with Heisenberg symmetry on general lattices in one, two and three dimensions. They have attracted great attention for several reasons. In many cases their ground states are magnetically disordered with an energy gap to all excited states and exponentially decaying spin correlation functions. This both provided a theoretical underpinning to the conjecture that one-dimensional (1D) integer spin Heisenberg antiferromagnets have an energy gap, and gave an early example of a gapped spin liquid phase in 2 and 3 dimensions. In a joint theoretical-experimental paper, Affleck and collaborators showed that the 1D spin-1 AKLT model has gapless spin ½ excitations at the ends of a finite chain, explaining experimental observations on NENP.

Affleck developed a theory for 3D Heisenberg antiferromagnets consisting of weakly coupled chains which predicted an analogue of the Higgs particle, thus explaining puzzling neutron scattering results on CsNiCl3 from Chalk River.

Affleck and collaborators developed a powerful theoretical technique, boundary conformal field theory, to study various types of quantum impurities, quantum dots and quantum junctions in condensed matter physics. One consequence is the Affleck-Ludwig entropy.

Affleck is a fellow of the Royal Society (London) and winner of the 2012 APS Onsager Prize. nominator citation

The purpose of the CAP Brockhouse Medal, which is sponsored jointly by the Division of Condensed Matter and Materials Physics (DCMMP) and the Canadian Association of Physicists (CAP), is to recognize and encourage outstanding experimental or theoretical contributions to condensed matter and materials physics. It is named in honour of Bertram Brockhouse, whose outstanding contributions to research in condensed matter physics in Canada were recognized by the 1994 Nobel Prize for Physics. The Brockhouse medal was first introduced in 1999 and has been awarded annually since.

Prof. Ian Affleck will be presented with the 2014 CAP Brockhouse Medal at the 2014 CAP Congress (hosted by Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, from June 16-20) at the end of his plenary talk and will be recognized during the Congress banquet to be held on Thursday, June 19, 2014. Please refer to the Congress program for the schedule of plenary talks by CAP medal winners. medal description

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, Institutional, 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. cap description

joint description

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For more information, please contact:

Canadian Association of Physicists
Tel: (613) 562-5614
Fax: (613) 562-5615
E-mail: cap@uottawa.cacap contact and joint contact