Current Winner - 2022

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.

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