Nobel laureate François Englert, Higgs boson pioneer, dies at 93

François Englert, the Belgian physicist who won the 2013 Nobel Prize for his role in discovering the Higgs boson, passed away on June 18 at the age of 93. His contributions fundamentally changed the understanding of how particles acquire mass, a cornerstone of modern particle physics.

Englert was born to Polish-Jewish immigrants and survived the Holocaust by moving between orphanages and foster homes to evade Nazi persecution. He spent most of his career at the Université libre de Bruxelles, where he obtained his PhD in 1959.

In 1964, together with the American-Belgian physicist Robert Brout, Englert published a landmark paper proposing the Brout-Englert-Higgs (BEH) mechanism. They theorised that the vacuum of space is not empty but filled with a fundamental field. By interacting with this field, otherwise massless particles acquire mass. This solved a critical problem in the Standard Model of particle physics, explaining why particles like the W and Z bosons have mass while others, like the photon, do not.

Independently, British physicist Peter Higgs proposed a similar mechanism, and a third paper by Gerald Guralnik, C. Richard Hagen, and Tom Kibble provided a more mathematically rigorous proof. The collective insight is sometimes called the BEHGHK mechanism within the scientific community.

The existence of the Higgs boson, the particle associated with the field, was confirmed in 2012 at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. Englert and Higgs were present at the announcement and shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics. (Brout had died in 2011.)

Beyond the Higgs boson, Englert contributed to statistical physics and quantum field theory. In later years, he focused on cosmology and string theory, seeking to reconcile quantum mechanics with general relativity. He was a professor emeritus at the Université libre de Bruxelles and a recurring scholar at Tel Aviv and Chapman Universities.