Robert Brout

Robert Brout ( born June 14, 1928 in New York; † 3 May, 2011 Brussels ) was an American- Belgian physicist.

Life

Brout studied in New York and Columbia ( USA) and was from 1958 to 1960 assistant professor at Cornell University. Since 1961 he worked at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Free University of Brussels), where he became professor in 1966. He took part in the Belgian citizenship.

In the 1950s, Brout dealt with the many-body theory of the solid ( excitations in electron gas models, etc.) and statistical mechanics. His book Phase Transitions appeared in 1965, before the area of phase transitions has been revolutionized in the 1960s. On August 31, 1964 published Brout and François Englert a mechanism that explains the short range of the weak force by a massive vector boson is introduced. This is nothing but the cause of the mass itself Just a few days later, on September 15, appeared a similar work by Peter Higgs. After the three physicists Brout - Englert - boson, the Higgs particle is called, but usually abbreviated as Higgs boson. In her work from 1964 Brout and Englert also showed how the electromagnetic and the weak force through so-called "spontaneous symmetry breaking " can be combined.

Later Brout also dealt with cosmological inflation with quantum gravity and black holes. For this research, he was awarded the 1977 Gravity Research Foundation 1st Award.

1997 were honored with the High Energy Physics Prize of the European Physical Society and in 2004 with the Wolf Prize Brout, Englert and Higgs. In 2005, Brout and Englert honorary doctors of the Free University of Brussels. In 2010 he was honored with the other explorers of the Higgs mechanism with the Sakurai Prize.

Brout was married and had three children.