[6][9] Kibble worked on mechanisms of symmetry breaking, phase transitions and the topological defects (monopoles, cosmic strings or domain walls) that can be formed.
[10][11][12] As part of Physical Review Letters 50th anniversary celebration, the journal recognised this discovery as one of the milestone papers in PRL history.
[14] While Guralnik, Hagen, and Kibble are widely considered to have authored the most complete of the early papers on the Higgs theory, they were controversially not included in the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics.
[24] He was one of the two co-chairs of an interdisciplinary research programme funded by the European Science Foundation (ESF) on Cosmology in the Laboratory (COSLAB) which ran from 2001 to 2005.
He was previously the coordinator of an ESF Network on Topological Defects in Particle Physics, Condensed Matter & Cosmology (TOPDEF).
[9] Kibble was an elected Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1980,[1][25] of the Institute of Physics (1991), and of Imperial College London (2009).
[30][31] Kibble was posthumously awarded the Isaac Newton Medal by the Institute of Physics for his outstanding lifelong commitment to the field.
[35][36][37][38][39] In the 1950s and 1960s, Kibble became concerned about the nuclear arms race[40] and from 1970 he took leading roles in several organisations promoting scientists' social responsibility.