François Englert

Université Libre de Bruxelles

François Englert is a Belgian theoretical physicist and professor emeritus at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). He was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics, shared with Peter Higgs, for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, later confirmed through the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN's Large Hadron Collider in 2012. Englert and Robert Brout proposed the Englert-Brout-Higgs mechanism in 1964, just weeks before Peter Higgs published his similar findings. This mechanism explains how elementary particles acquire mass through their interaction with a scalar field—the Higgs field—that permeates all of space. The discovery of the Higgs boson with a mass of approximately 125 GeV completed the Standard Model of particle physics, the most successful theoretical framework in the history of physics. Englert has also made contributions to quantum field theory, gravitation, and cosmology, including work on the nature of space-time at very short distances. He has been a visiting professor and collaborator at numerous international institutions and has received honorary doctorates from universities around the world. He is a member of several European academies of science and has received awards including the Prince of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research and the Wolf Prize in Physics.