Gordon L. Kane

Gordon Kane (born January 16, 1937) is Victor Weisskopf Distinguished Professor at the University of Michigan and MCTP Director Emeritus. From 2002 until 2011 he was Victor Weisskopf Collegiate Professor of Physics at the same university. From 2005 until 2001 he also directed the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics (MCTP), a leading center for the advancement of theoretical physics. In 2012 he received the Lilienfeld Prize from the American Physical Society.

Kane is an internationally recognized scientific leader in theoretical and phenomenological particle physics, and theories for physics beyond the Standard Model. In recent years he has been a leader in string phenomenology. Kane has been with the University of Michigan since 1965.

Work

Early fundamental research

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. The SSC project was finally halted and replaced by the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Geneva, which will test 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 colloborators he pointed out the potential LHC inverse problem and solutions towards its resolution.^[7]

Recent notable research

Kane’s more recent work has been in the development of testable models based on string theory, in particular those based on G_2 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] 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.^[10] 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.

Scientific summary

Kane has published over 200 research articles and 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 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.

Books

• Higgs Hunter Guide
• Modern Elementary Particle Physics
• Perspectives on Higgs Physics (I,II)
• Perspectives on LHC Physics (New 2009)
• Perspectives on Supersymmetry (I,II) - (New 2010)
• Particle Garden
• Supersymmetry: unveiling of the ultimate laws of nature

References

External links

• Faculty webpage
• Research webpage
• Publications