2017 Medal Winners | francais

The 2017 CAP-TRIUMF Vogt Medal for Contributions to Subatomic Physics

is awarded to

Charles Gale

"Canada has a long and illustrious tradition of research in subatomic physics, and I am deeply honoured to have been chosen as this year's recipient of the CAP-TRIUMF Vogt medal. I thank all of my collaborators, and I am thrilled to share this recognition with them." winner citation

The Canadian Association of Physicists (CAP) and TRIUMF are pleased to announce that the 2017 CAP-TRIUMF Vogt Medal for Contributions to Subatomic Physics is awarded to Charles Gale, McGill University, in recognition of for advances in theoretical nuclear physics including the theory and modelling of high-energy nuclear collisions. announcement

Much is understood about the theory of the nuclear strong interaction, QCD (Quantum Chromodynamics), but far less is known about its behaviour at extreme conditions of temperature and density. What happens deep in the interior of neutron stars? What did the universe look like, only a few microseconds after the big bang? To provide answers to questions like those, a vigorous experimental program based on colliding heavy nuclei at large energies is currently under way at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Charles Gale�s theoretical work has been used to motivate and interpret several generations of experimental collaborations. He has made many seminal contributions to the theory of relativistic heavy ion collisions, to finite-temperature field theory, and to relativistic many-body physics in general. Professor Gale is renowned for his work on the emission of electromagnetic radiation in high-energy nuclear collisions, for calculations of observables connected to the nuclear equation of state, and for development and use of relativistic viscous hydrodynamics to model the plasma of quarks and gluons created during the interaction of energetic nuclei. He is the author of more than 225 peer-reviewed papers, and he has also co-authored a textbook on field theories at finite temperature which has become a standard reference; it is being used by practitioners of nuclear and particle physics, and of astrophysics. nominator citation

- 30 -