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.

The SSC project was finally halted and replaced by the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Geneva where this was indeed the discovery method.

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.

[3] Kane made important early contributions to the study of the Higgs bosons, including an upper limit on the Higgs boson mass,[4] implications of electric dipole moments, the muon g-2 experiment, the study of dark matter and its detection,[5] and to early supergravity[6] and string theory phenomenology.

[8] With colleagues, he has recently re-emphasized the role of neutralino dark matter in the context of cosmic ray data,[9][10] as well as the importance of connecting dark matter and the LHC - in particular focusing on light gluinos and light neutralinos (the putative superparteners of the gluon and W boson respectively) that arise in supergravity and string theory motivated models.

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.

The prize, considered one of the most prestigious in physics, was awarded for his work on the theory of the properties, reactions, and signatures of the Higgs boson.