October 25, 2022
The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) team, composed of world leaders in cosmology, pulsars, high energy astrophysics and galactic emission, is awarded this year’s Brockhouse Canada Prize for Interdisciplinary Research in Science and Engineering.
The Brockhouse Canada Prize for Interdisciplinary Research in Science and Engineering recognizes outstanding Canadian teams of researchers from different disciplines who came together to engage in research drawing on their combined knowledge and skills, and produced a record of excellent achievements in the natural sciences and engineering.
This award was part of the NSERC Prizes announcement made by the Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, and Professor Alejandro Adem, President of NSERC.
Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) team
Brockhouse Canada Prize for Interdisciplinary Research in Science and Engineering
University of British Columbia, McGill University, University of Toronto, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, National Research Council of Canada
The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) team is composed of world leaders in cosmology, pulsars, high energy astrophysics and galactic emission. Together, this powerful collaboration of experts has designed and built one of the most novel and extraordinarily powerful radio telescopes in the world.
Unlike traditional telescopes that mechanically point to and observe a small region of the sky, this revolutionary technology forms an image of the entire overhead sky each day by digitally processing the information received on a compact array of 2048 radio receivers as the Earth rotates.
The CHIME team’s breakthroughs are having an enormous impact in areas beyond dark energy. The telescope’s large collecting area, wide bandwidth and enormous field of view made it the world’s foremost instrument for detecting Fast Radio Bursts—brief bursts of radio waves coming from far beyond our Milky Way galaxy—and a vastly improved tool for measuring the cadence of pulsars, the best clocks in the Universe.
The CHIME team has also created a progressive training environment for students, post-doctoral fellows and research associates. The team proudly includes members of underrepresented groups in physics. Their award-winning collaboration has already produced profound new knowledge about some of the greatest mysteries of our universe, with major advances still anticipated. It is truly one of the biggest success stories in Canadian astrophysics.