Physicist Englert, one of the pioneers of the Higgs boson, has died

The Belgian physicist François Englert, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013, who, together with Peter Higgs, helped develop the theory explaining the mechanism by which elementary particles acquire mass – one of the most important discoveries in modern physics – has died at the age of 93 at his home in Uccle, near Brussels.

He was one of the key figures in the development of the Standard Model of elementary particles and, together with Robert Brout, co-authored the mechanism that explains the origin of mass. Born in Etterbeek, Belgium, on 6 November 1932, Englert came from a Jewish family of Polish origin. His childhood was dramatically marked by the Second World War and Nazi persecution: as a ‘child of the Holocaust’, he lived in hiding under a false identity, moving between various Belgian towns – Dinant, Lustin, Stoumont and Annevoie-Rouillon – until the Liberation. This experience was to leave a profound mark on his personal development even before his scientific career. After studying electromechanical engineering, he graduated from the Free University of Brussels in 1955, completing his PhD in physics in 1959. Shortly afterwards, he began a pivotal period in the United States at Cornell University, where he worked as an assistant to Robert Brout. It marked the start of a scientific collaboration destined to transform 20th-century theoretical physics. On his return to Belgium, Englert and Brout continued their work at the Free University of Brussels, establishing a research group dedicated to fundamental interactions. During those years, drawing inspiration in part from Yoichiro Nambu’s work on phase transitions and superconductivity, the two physicists developed the revolutionary idea of spontaneous symmetry breaking as applied to quantum field theory.

The breakthrough came in 1964: Englert and Brout proposed that particles could acquire mass through interaction with a fundamental field pervading the entire universe. Around the same time, independently, Peter Higgs formulated a similar idea, also introducing the existence of a particle associated with this field, later named the Higgs boson. The Brout–Englert–Higgs mechanism resolved a crucial problem in theoretical physics of the 1960s: the apparent contradiction between the electroweak theory and the masslessness of the bosons mediating weak interactions. Thanks to this insight, particle physics found one of its most solid conceptual foundations, now incorporated into the Standard Model.