Gordon L. Kane

In 1982 Kane co-led the international Snowmass working group study that pointed to the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) as the next scientific direction for particle physics. Kane suggested, along with Jack Gunion, at Snowmass studies that Higgs bosons could be best detected at the SSC or LHC via the rare gamma gamma decay mode (finally documented in Nucl. Phys. B 299 (1988) 231, also with Wudka.). The SSC project was finally halted and replaced by the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Geneva where this was indeed the discovery method. The LHC continues to probe for the presence of supersymmetry, the leading candidate model for new physics beyond the Standard Model.

Around the same time Kane and Leveille[1] performed the first calculation of the Feynman rules for gluinos, and of the production of gluinos at colliders, which turns out to be one of the most important ways to discover supersymmetry at the LHC.

Gordon Kane is also well known for his work with Howard Haber, putting together and elucidating the structure of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) into a complete and calculable context in 1984. Their seminal article published in 1985[2] remains one of the single most important references on supersymmetry and the MSSM. A detailed companion report was published in 2002.[3]

Kane made important early contributions to the study of the Higgs bosons, including an upper limit on the Higgs boson mass,[4] implications of electric dipole moments, the muon g-2 experiment, the study of dark matter and its detection,[5] and to early supergravity[6] and string theory phenomenology. With collaborators he pointed out the potential LHC inverse problem and solutions towards its resolution.[7]

Kane's more recent work has been in the development of testable models based on string theory, in particular those based on G₂ compactifications of M-Theory, a predictive approach that might explain the hierarchy between the weak scale and the Planck scale.[8] With colleagues, he has recently re-emphasized the role of neutralino dark matter in the context of cosmic ray data,[9][10] as well as the importance of connecting dark matter and the LHC - in particular focusing on light gluinos and light neutralinos (the putative superparteners of the gluon and W boson respectively) that arise in supergravity and string theory motivated models.[11] He has argued that these ideas form a consistent framework with a non-thermal cosmological history of the universe.

Recently, he and collaborators have generalized results of compactified string theories, and in particular have shown that scalar superpartners should have masses of order tens of TeV. He and collaborators have also proposed string motivated explanations for major questions in particle theory, including the so-called "little hierarchy" or "fine-tuning" problem, and major related questions in cosmology, including understanding the ratio of the baryonic matter to dark matter in the universe.

Kane has published over 200 research articles, with over 20,000 citations and an h-number of 65. He has written or co-authored or edited at least 10 physics books, and has 3 influential Scientific American particle physics articles. A chapter from one book was reprinted in an anthology, with other chapters by Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Hawking, Maxwell, Heisenberg, Weinberg. Two of his more recent books includes “Perspectives on Supersymmetry”, and “Perspectives on LHC Physics”, both of which provide extensive reviews of the field.

Kane has been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Fellow of the British Institute of Physics, and a Guggenheim Fellow. He has served on many government advisory panels, most recently as chair of the theoretical physics subpanel on the three-year Committee of Visitors of the Physical and Mathematical Sciences Division of the National Science Foundation, the highest evaluation panel the NSF has. Kane also has been on several national laboratory program policy committees. He has served on the international advisory committees of over 40 national and international meetings. He was a winner of the 1998 Physics Today Essay Contest "Physics Tomorrow". He has been Delphasus Lecturer at the University of California at Santa Cruz, distinguished visiting speaker at the University of California Davis, Dozer Lecturer at Ben-Gurion University, Lewiner Lecturer at the Technion in Tel-Aviv, and an American Physical Society Centennial Speaker. In 2017, Kane was awarded the prestigious, J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics. The prize, considered one of the most prestigious in physics, was awarded for his work on the theory of the properties, reactions, and signatures of the Higgs boson.[12]

He has two popular books for any curious reader, “The Particle Garden”, focusing on the Standard Model, and “Supersymmetry and Beyond” focusing on physics beyond the Standard Model, including string/M-theory. And he is a frequent contributor to Edge.org.