2015 Medal Winners | francais

The 2015 CAP Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Physics

is awarded to

John F. Martin

"It is a great honour to be awarded this CAP medal. The experimental subatomic physics program in Canada has grown tremendously during my career, both in scope and international impact, and it has been quite an adventure to be involved. My contributions have been very much part of a collaborative enterprise, and in that spirit I consider that I’m sharing this recognition with my many colleagues." winner citation

The Canadian Association of Physicists (CAP) is pleased to announce that the 2015 CAP Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Physics is awarded to John F. Martin, University of Toronto / IPP, in recognition of for his contributions to experimental particle physics and his leadership role in the international physics community. announcement

John Martin has made wide-ranging contributions to advances in particle physics and detector technology. As a professor at the University of Toronto and a principal research scientist of the Institute for Particle Physics, he has made seminal particle physics measurements over a 40-year career at five laboratories on three continents. He and his colleagues made the first measurements of the lifetime of hadrons containing charm quarks in the 1970s, elucidating how the heavy charmed quark interacts with the lighter quarks in the hadron. He was a leader in the development of the HERA high-energy electron-proton (ep) collider program at DESY in Germany, serving for almost 30 years as the Canadian principal investigator of the ZEUS experiment. This experiment made two important discoveries, the very rapid rise of the density of the partons in the proton carrying very low momentum fraction, and a surprisingly large rate of ep collisions with the proton surviving intact even at very high momentum transfer. Martin led the development of very precise instruments that measure particle energies, known as calorimeters, enabling the accurate measurement of the kinematics of the ep collisions. These results profoundly increased our understanding of QCD, and confirmed with high precision the electroweak theory. For the past decade, Martin has had a leading role in the Tokai-to-Kamiokanda (T2K) neutrino oscillation experiment in Japan. He has developed novel detectors and his group has taken prominent roles in the discovery of electron-neutrino appearance in the muon-neutrino beam. The strength of this effect enables the exploration of CP violation in the neutrino sector, possibly the source for today's matter-antimatter asymmetry. Martin's scientific leadership is evident in his senior leadership roles in the community. He has served on numerous senior international advisory committees, chaired funding committees and played a leadership role in the development of Canada's particle physics community. nominator citation

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