Joseph Lykken
Joseph David Lykken is an American theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and, from July 1, 2014 to Sept 6, 2022, he was the Deputy Director of Fermilab. He is currently Director of Fermilab's Quantum Division.
Background and education
Lykken was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota.He is the son of David T. Lykken, noted psychologist, behavioral geneticist, and twin researcher.
Lykken received his Ph.D. in 1982 from M.I.T. He arrived at Fermilab in 1989, where he worked in the Fermilab Theory Division, and as a collaborator of the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider.
Research
In 1983 Lykken's paper with Lawrence Hall and Steven Weinberg helped establish the minimal supersymmetric standard model as a leading paradigm for physics beyond the Standard Model.In 1996 Lykken proposed "weak scale superstrings," which posited extra dimensions of space within the reach of particle colliders, such as the Fermilab Tevatron, and the CERN Large Hadron Collider. As a member of the
CMS collaboration, he was co-author of the Higgs boson
discovery paper, and with Maurizio Pierini, Chris Rogan, and Maria Spiropulu, developed a new set of kinematic variables targeting the discovery and characterization of new physics at the LHC.
Since 2018 he has been a member of the Quantum Communications Channels for Fundamental Physics project, supported by the
QuantISED program of the U.S. Dept. of Energy Office of High Energy Physics. Accomplishments of this project include the first laboratory demonstration of traversable
wormhole teleportation, using a Google Sycamore quantum processor.