2014 Medal Winners | francais

The 2014 CAP Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Physics

is awarded to

André-Marie Tremblay

"Physics always fascinated me, but I never believed that it would allow me to meet so many talented students, postdocs and colleagues without whom, in the final analysis, good ideas would have never seen the light of day. Their presence is precious for me and it is in their name that I accept this prize. Thanks also to the CRC program, UdeS, CIFAR, and the numerous funding agencies." winner quote

The Canadian Association of Physicists (CAP) is pleased to announce that the 2014 CAP Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Physics is awarded to André-Marie Tremblay, Université de Sherbrooke, in recognition of for his pioneering work in the theory of Quantum Materials. announcement

The CAP medal for achievement is awarded to André-Marie Tremblay for his contributions to Condensed Matter and Statistical Physics that spanned almost four decades and covered a broad range of topics and methods and included several seminal contributions.

To some he is known for his demonstration that the Langevin formalism could be applied to dissipative steady-states. To others he is known for his work on electrical noise on fractals and percolation clusters where he independently discovered the concept of multifractals. This was a radical shift from standard thinking on critical exponents since multifractals lead to an infinite hierarchy of exponents, by contrast with ordinary critical phenomena where only a few exponents are relevant.

Upon his nomination as one of the initial members of the Superconductivity program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research in 1988, he embarked on a long term research program in this highly competitive field. Solving the Hubbard model in two-dimensions was considered the main theoretical challenge. This model is considered the paradigm of strongly interacting electrons on a lattice. The difficulty in the context of high-temperature superconductivity comes from its non-perturbative nature, kinetic and potential energy being comparable. The approach that he developed in the mid- 1990’s, the Two-Particle Self-Consistent approach (TPSC), is non-perturbative and satisfies various important theorems, sum rules and consistency checks. It gives the best quantitative agreement with benchmark numerical results. A large number of experimental results in electron-doped cuprates find their natural explanation with his approach.

Tremblay also acquired a prominent role in the theory of high-temperature superconductors through his pioneering work of the last nine years or so with numerical Quantum Cluster approaches. His main achievements have been the first demonstration that the strong coupling pseudogap in the Hubbard model could explain experiments on high-Tc, the first doping phase-diagram with accurate ranges for antiferromagnetism and d-wave superconducting ground states, the first pressure phase diagram of layered organic superconductors in agreement with experiments. He has found some of the strongest arguments in favor of the existence of superconductivity in the Hubbard model at weak to intermediate coupling. nominator citation

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