CANADIAN ASSOCIATION OF PHYSICISTS

ASSOCIATION CANADIENNE DES PHYSICIENS ET PHYSICIENNES

The Canadian Association of Physicists (CAP) is pleased to announce that the 2008 Herzberg Medal is awarded to Dr. Carl Svensson, University of Guelph for his strong leadership and major accomplishments in experimental nuclear physics, including measurements that improve significantly the understanding of high angular momentum states in medium weight nuclei and fundamental physics measurements using radioactive beams.

Carl Svensson has become an outstanding leader in the new field of Rare Isotope research which is the highest goal, worldwide, of the nuclear physics community and for which Canada's new Isotope Separator and Accelerator (ISAC) at TRIUMF is the world's first major facility. He established an international reputation early with his pioneering doctoral work at McMaster University on superdeformed rotational bands in medium weight nuclei, followed by postdoctoral work at Berkeley on the same subject. He declined the prestigious Wigner Fellowship at Oak Ridge and the Fermi Fellowship at Argonne to return to Canada where, at Guelph University, he launched his major program at ISAC. He is the principal investigator of the TIGRESS Collaboration, a group of 84 researchers from 16 institutions in Canada, France the United Kingdom and the United States which has received almost 10 million dollars from Canadian sources alone and has just produced its first beams. TIGRESS will have major impact on nuclear structure, nuclear astrophysics and on fundamental symmetries. He has launched a challenging and high-priority program to measure electric dipole moments (EDM) in odd-mass radon nuclei. particularly suited for this purpose, which is a program with enormous discovery potential. He has published more than a hundred papers in prestigious journals (a dozen in Phys. Rev. Lett.) for many of which he was the lead author and some of which received hundreds of citations. He has also established an active graduate and postdoctoral program at the University of Guelph. Svensson has demonstrated that he is a truly exceptionsl, new, young leader of Canadian physics who has recognized a grreat opportunity and seized it strongly.

The CAP Herzberg Medal was first introduced in 1970 and is awarded annually. Dr. Svensson will receive the 2008 Prize during the CAP's awards banquet to be held at Laval University on June 10th, 2008.

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 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.

For more information, please contact:

Canadian Association of Physicists
Tel: (613) 562-5614
Fax: (613) 562-5615
E-mail: cap@physics.uottawa.ca