Chennai-born physicist Tom Kibble, whose work was crucial in the theory of the Higgs Boson, died on Thursday. He was 83. Prof. Kibble had been working with Blackett Laboratory at Imperial College, London.
“After Peter Higgs formulated his ground-breaking mechanism for the [simpler] Abelian gauge theories, in 1964, Tom Kibble came up with a more general version for non-Abelian gauge theories, in 1967.
This immediately led Weinberg to make the connection and postulate the Higgs Mechanism. Kibble’s contribution was crucial in making Weinberg see the connection,” says G. Rajasekaran, leading particle physicist from Chennai.
Several awards and honours did come Prof. Kibble’s way, including the Order of the British Empire, and Albert Einstein Medal.
However, the fact that he was not included in the Nobel in 2013, for the discovery of the Higgs Boson, which went to Peter Higgs and Francois Englert, reportedly worried even Higgs himself. Prof. Kibble has also done path-breaking work in cosmic strings.
Prof. Kibble was born in Madras, as Chennai was known then, in 1932, and his father was a math and statistics professor at Madras Christian College (MCC).
During his trip to Chennai in 2012, just after the discovery of the Higgs Boson, Prof. Rajasekaran recalls accompanying him on a visit to MCC, where the latter was feted. Joshua Kalapati, Associate Professor of Philosophy and co-author of Life and Legacy of Madras Christian College, said Prof. Kibble had shared many anecdotes related to his college life and the city of Madras.
His parents, Walter and Janet, were an integral part of MCC for close to four decades between 1924 and 1961. “While Professor [Walter] Kibble, with a Mathematics Tripos (Cambridge University), and Doctorate in Statistics (Edinburgh), contributed to the growth of the Mathematics Department in the college, Janet served as the first warden of the women’s hostel in Guindy,” Mr. Kalapati said.
This article has been corrected for a typographical error.
Francois Englebert has been changed to Englert.
