Belgian physicist François Englert, a particle physics specialist and 2013 Nobel Prize winner for work on the Higgs boson, died over the weekend at age 93. CERN said he died in Uccle, Belgium. The Higgs boson is regarded as a cornerstone of matter, the elementary particle that gives mass to many others under the standard model.
Englert shared the 2013 Nobel Prize with British physicist Peter Higgs, who died in 2024. The two laid the theoretical groundwork in 1964 for the eventual discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory in Switzerland. CERN said in a Facebook post that Englert, together with his colleague Robert Brout, showed that elementary particles can gain mass through interaction with a field that exists throughout the universe.
CERN added that Higgs independently proposed the same mechanism. The existence of the Brout-Englert-Higgs field was confirmed in 2012 with the discovery of the associated particle in the ATLAS and CMS experiments.
Englert was born on November 6, 1932, to a Jewish family in Etterbeek in the Brussels area. After studying civil engineering, he earned a doctorate and devoted more than seven decades to theoretical physics. He later joined Cornell University in the United States, where he met Brout, and the two later led the theoretical physics department at the Free University of Brussels. When he received the Nobel Prize in 2013, Englert said his work had always focused on “the pursuit of understanding and a rational explanation of the world,” adding, “Irrational ideas have already caused enough damage to Europe. Science is essential to building a civilization worthy of the name.” He said he was a nonconformist and had no religious belief, and noted that during World War II, while Belgium was under Nazi occupation, he and his family were forced into hiding.
