2021 Medal Winners | francais

The 2021 CAP Herzberg Medal

is awarded to

Simon Caron-Huot

"I feel greatly honored to receive the CAP Herzberg medal and particularly humbled to join previous recipients whom I admire. Theoretical physics is a collaborative effort and I thank every student, postdoc, colleague and collaborator I have had the privilege to work with." winner citation

The Canadian Association of Physicists (CAP) is pleased to announce that the 2021 CAP Herzberg Medal is awarded to Simon Caron-Huot, McGill University, in recognition of to recognize his creation and development of nonperturbative techniques in conformal field theory, thereby opening the way to broad-ranging applications from particle physics to condensed matter physics. announcement

Caron-Huot is a leading expert in quantum field theory, where he has pioneered analytic techniques which circumvent the traditional perturbative approach based on Feynman diagrams. His recent discovery of a Lorentzian inversion formula has revolutionized the study of conformal field theory. His research aims to answer fundamental questions about the way elementary particles interact at the shortest of distances. His methods emphasize the role of universal principles from relativity and quantum mechanics which underpin quantum field theory, which he applies to the Standard Model and to diverse theoretical models that include conformal field theories. These capture scale-invariant phenomena in many settings, including quantum fluctuations in particle physics, statistical fluctuations near second-order phase transitions, and the celebrated AdS/CFT correspondence which equates a conformal field theory with a theory of quantum gravity in a higher dimensional spacetime. The success of this approach illuminates the power and unity of the principles underlying modern physics, just as it further tests them.

Caron-Huot has held research positions at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and joined the physics department of McGill University as an assistant professor and Canada Research Chair in 2016. He has received many awards and honors, including the 2017 Gribov Medal by the European Physical Society, the 2018 Hermann Weyl prize, and the 2020 New Horizon in Physics Breakthrough prize. Most recently, he was awarded a 2020 Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship. nominator citation

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