Sir Thomas Walter Bannerman "Tom" Kibble, CBE FRS (23 December 1932 – 2 June 2016), was a British theoretical physicist, senior research investigator at The Blackett Laboratory, at Imperial College London, UK and Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College. His research interests were in quantum field theory, especially the interface between high-energy particle physics and cosmology. He has worked on mechanisms of symmetry breaking, phase transitions and the topological defects (monopoles, cosmic strings or domain walls) that can be formed. His paper on cosmic strings introduced the phenomenon into modern cosmology. He graduated from the University of Edinburgh (BSc 1955, MA 1956, PhD 1958).

Career

Kibble is most noted for his co-discovery of the Higgs mechanism and Higgs boson with Gerald Guralnik and C. R. Hagen (GHK). As part of Physical Review Letters 50th anniversary celebration, the journal recognized this discovery as one of the milestone papers in PRL history. For this discovery Prof. Kibble was awarded The American Physical Society's 2010 J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics. While widely considered to have authored the most complete of the early papers on the Higgs theory, GHK were controversially not included in the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics. In 2014, Nobel Laureate Peter Higgs expressed disappointment that Kibble had not been chosen to share the Nobel Prize with François Englert and himself.

Kibble was a Fellow of the Royal Society, of the Institute of Physics, and of Imperial College London, a member of the American Physical Society, the European Physical Society and the Academia Europaea, an honorary member of the Romanian Academy as well as a CBE. He has been awarded the Hughes Medal of the Royal Society, the Rutherford and Guthrie Medals of the Institute of Physics, and the Albert Einstein Medal. He pioneered the study of topological defect generation in the early universe. The paradigmatic mechanism of defect formation across a second-order phase transition is known as the Kibble-Zurek mechanism. Kibble was one of the two co-chairs of an interdisciplinary research programme funded by the European Science Foundation (ESF) on Cosmology in the Laboratory (COSLAB) which ran from 2001 to 2005. He was previously the coordinator of an ESF Network on Topological Defects in Particle Physics, Condensed Matter & Cosmology (TOPDEF). Kibble is the author, jointly with Frank Berkshire of the Imperial College Mathematics Department, of a textbook on classical mechanics, titled Classical Mechanics. The fifth edition was published by Imperial College Press in Spring 2004. In 2008, Kibble was named an Outstanding Referee by the American Physical Society.

He was knighted in the 2014 Birthday Honours for services to physics.

Personal life

Kibble was born in Madras, India and is the grandson of author Helen Bannerman and William Bannerman, who was an officer in the Indian Medical Service. He was educated at Doveton Corrie School in Madras, India and then in Edinburgh, UK at Melville College and at Edinburgh University. Kibble was married to Anne Allan from 1957 until her death in 2005. Kibble had three children.