Tom W. B. Kibble

Thomas Walter Bannerman Kibble (Tom Kibble, usually cited as TWBKibble; born December 23, 1932 in Madras ) is a British theoretical physicist.

Life

TWB Kibble was born the son of the mathematician Walter Frederick Kibble and the missionary Janet Cowan Watson Bannerman ( 1893-1976 ). At the University of Edinburgh, he earned his Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and a Master of Science in Physics. In 1958 he was at the University of Edinburgh Ph.D. PhD in Mathematical Physics. Then he taught from 1958 to 1959 at the California Institute of Technology and as a lecturer from 1959 to 1970 at Imperial College London.

He was since 1970 Professor and Senior Researcher at the Blackett Laboratory, Imperial College London, where he Board of the physics faculty was in the 1980s and is now professor emeritus. He is best known for his work with Carl R. Hagen and Gerald Guralnik via spontaneous symmetry breaking as a method of mass production of vector bosons in Yang-Mills theories, an important basis of the standard model. Independently managed this well Peter Higgs and François Englert and Robert Brout. , Later known as the Higgs mechanism. Next he worked on structure formation by topological defects in cosmology as cosmic strings.

Awards

Kibble is since 1980 a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1981 he was awarded with the Higgs Hughes Medal of the Royal Society, in 1984 also with the Higgs Rutherford Medal of the Institute of Physics. In 1998, he was Commander of the British Empire. In 2010 he received the Sakurai Prize with Guralnik, Hagen, Higgs, Englert, Brout. In 2012 he received the Royal Medal of the Royal Society. 2013 was the awarded him with James Peebles and Martin Rees Dirac Medal ( ICTP ).

Writings

• Classical Mechanics. 1966 McGraw Hill, 3rd edition, Longman 1985