François Englert

Baron François Englert ( born November 6, 1932 in Etterbeek, Belgium) is a Belgian theoretical physicist and university teacher. On 8 October 2013, the Nobel Prize for physics was awarded jointly to Peter Higgs.

Youth

François Englert comes from a Jewish family and is a survivor of the Holocaust; it was during the Second World War, a so-called " hidden child ".

Professional life

Englert made ​​in 1955 with a degree in mechanical engineering and electrical engineering at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB ) and received his PhD in 1959 in physics. He was then to 1961 at Cornell University with Robert Brout, most recently as an assistant professor. He returned to Brussels, where he became a professor. Robert Brout also came there as a professor at him. Together they launched from 1980, the Department of Theoretical Physics. In 1998 he became Professor Emeritus.

Regardless of Peter Higgs ( and Carl R. Hagen, Gerald Guralnik and Tom Kibble ) he discovered Brout 1964, named after that Higgs mechanism of mass generation for gauge fields by symmetry breaking in analogy to solid state physics ( Englert and Brout: Broken Symmetry and the Mass of Gauge Vector mesons in: .. ., Physical Review Letters Volume 13, 1964, p 321-323 ) by a scalar field ( Higgs field ). This mechanism is responsible for the masses of the fundamental particles in the Standard Model of elementary particles today. They suspected that the gauge theory renormalizable remain with symmetry breaking. This was in the early 1970s by Gerardus ' t Hooft and Martinus Veltman proved that it received the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics.

He also worked on statistical mechanics, cosmology, string theory and gravity theory. In 1978 he was awarded with Brout and Gunzig for The Causal Universe 1st prize at the International Contest of Gravity Gravity Research Foundation.

In 1997 he received the High Energy and Particle Physics Prize of the European Physical Society with Robert Brout and Higgs Peter and the Wolf Prize in 2004 with Brout and Higgs. In 1982 he received the Francqui price. In 2010 he was honored with the other explorers of the Higgs mechanism with the Sakurai Prize. 2013 was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award Englert, Peter Higgs and CERN. Finally, Englert was collected on July 8, 2013 Albert II with the title of baron in the Belgian nobility. In addition, Thomson Reuters Englert counted in 2013 due to the number of its citations to favorites to a Nobel Prize (Thomson Reuters Citation Laureates ), he eventually got also awarded along with Peter Higgs.