Gordon Kane

Gordon Leon Kane (born January 19, 1937) is Victor Weisskopf, a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan and director emeritus at the Leinweber Center for Theoretical Physics (LCTP), a leading center for the advancement of theoretical physics. He was director of the LCTP from 2005 to 2011 and Victor Weisskopf Collegiate Professor of Physics from 2002 - 2011. He received the Lilienfeld Prize from the American Physical Society in 2012 and the J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics in 2017.

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. 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 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 performed the first calculation of the Feynman rules for gluinos and of the production of gluinos at colliders, which turned 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 remains one of the single most important references on supersymmetry and the MSSM. A detailed companion report was published in 2002. Kane made important early contributions to the study of the Higgs bosons, including an upper limit on the Higgs boson mass, implications of electric dipole moments, the muon g-2 experiment, the study of dark matter and its detection, and to early supergravity and string theory phenomenology. 

With collaborators, he pointed out the potential LHC inverse problem and solutions towards its resolution. 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. This predictive approach might explain the hierarchy between the weak scale and the Planck scale. With colleagues, he has recently re-emphasized the role of neutralino dark matter in the context of cosmic ray data, as well as the importance of connecting dark matter and the LHC - in particular, focusing on light gluinos and light neutralinos (the putative superpartners of the gluon and W boson respectively) that arise in supergravity and string theory motivated models. 

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.