[1] Ken Johnson was a student at Case Western Reserve University and obtained his bachelor's degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1952.
[citation needed] Early in his career, Johnson together with Marshall Baker (University of Washington) undertook a systematic study of the short distance and high energy behavior of quantum electrodynamics (QED), which presaged modern studies of renormalization group flow and the search for ultraviolet fixed points of the QED đť›˝-function.
[9] The Bjorken–Johnson–Low Limit was used extensively in the study of scaling and perturbative anomalies in the late 1960s and was subsumed into the more general framework of the operator product expansion by Kenneth Wilson.
Together with Thomas DeGrand (University of Colorado), Joseph Kiskis (UC Davis), and Jaffe, Johnson showed that the spectra of light-quark baryons and mesons could be accommodated in QCD.
In his later years, Johnson focused on finding a heuristic description of the gluon field configurations that dominate the confining condensate in the QCD vacuum, a search that continues to this day.