Uccle, June 21, (Pam/Adnkronos) Belgian physicist François Englert, a 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics who, together with Peter Higgs, helped develop the theory that explains the mechanism by which elementary particles acquire mass, one of the most important discoveries in modern physics, died at the age of 93, at his home in Uccle, near Brussels.
He was among the protagonists of the construction of the Standard Model of elementary particles, and co-authored together with Robert Brout of the mechanism that explains the origin of the mass.
Born in Etterbeek, Belgium, on November 6, 1932, Englert belonged to a Jewish family of Polish descent. His childhood was marked dramatically by World War II and Nazi persecution.
As a “child of the Holocaust”, he lived hidden under a false identity, passing between several Belgian locations, Dinant, Lustin, Stoumont and Annevoie-Rouillon, until the Liberation.
An experience that would have left a deep imprint in his human formation, even before becoming a scientist.
After studying electromechanical engineering, he graduated from the Free University of Brussels in 1955, completing his doctorate in physics in 1959. Soon after, a decisive period began in the United States at Cornell University, where he worked as an assistant to Robert Brout. It was the beginning of a scientific collaboration destined to change the theoretical physics of the twentieth century.
Returning to Belgium, Englert and Brout continued their activities at the Free University of Brussels, building a research group dedicated to fundamental interactions. In those years, inspired by Yoichiro Nambu’s work on phase transitions and superconductivity, the two physicists developed the revolutionary idea of the spontaneous symmetry break applied to the quantum theory of fields.
In 1964 the turning point came. Englert and Brout proposed that particles could acquire mass through interaction with a fundamental field spread anywhere in the universe.
Around the same time, regardless, Peter Higgs formulated a similar idea, also introducing the existence of a particle associated with this field, then called the Higgs boson.
The Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism solved a crucial problem of 1960s theoretical physics: the apparent contradiction between electroweak theory and the mass absence of mediating bosons of weak interactions.
Thanks to this intuition, particle physics found one of its most solid conceptual foundations, now incorporated into the Standard Model.
GNA