In Memoriam

ICTP was greatly saddened to learn about the passing away of theoretical physicist Thomas Kibble.

Professor Kibble, a Senior Research Fellow and Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London, UK, made major contributions to the physics of spontaneous symmetry breaking, the mechanism by which a physical system "loses" some of its symmetries,  and to its cosmological consequences. Kibble was among the first to study in the 1960s what is now called the Higgs mechanism (an example of spontaneous symmetry breaking), the process by which subatomic particles first gain their mass through interactions with the Higgs boson (the elusive particle theorized by 2013 Nobel Prize winners François Englert and Peter W. Higgs and detected by CERN in 2012). Kibble investigated what happens when a symmetry "disappears" as the universe evolves from the Big Bang and understood the importance of "topological defects", which are relics of the past symmetric phase.

Among his many honours, Kibble received the ICTP Dirac Medal in 2013, sharing that year’s prize with Phillip Peebles and Martin Rees for their independent, ground-breaking work throughout their careers elucidating many aspects of fundamental physics, cosmology and astrophysics.