François Englert explained how particles get their mass

Person: François Englert
Lived: 1932–2026
Field: Theoretical physics
From: Belgian

The story

François Englert was born in Brussels in 1932 to Polish Jewish immigrants. During the German occupation of Belgium he survived as a hidden child under a false identity, sheltered by a café-owning couple in the Ardennes and by a village priest who passed his family off as Christians; his relatives in Poland were all murdered. After the war he trained as an engineer, switched to physics, and in 1959 went to Cornell University to work with Robert Brout, who became his lifelong collaborator in Brussels.

In the early 1960s physicists had elegant theories of the forces of nature, but those theories only worked if the particles carrying the forces had no mass. The weak force, which drives radioactive decay and the nuclear reactions in the Sun, plainly has heavy carriers, because it acts only over tiny distances. Adding mass by hand broke the theories. Particle physics was stuck.

Brout and Englert found the way out. In a 1964 paper in Physical Review Letters they showed that if empty space is filled with a field that settles into a state breaking the theory’s symmetry, much as the aligned atoms of a magnet break the symmetry of space, then force carriers that interact with the field become massive and short-ranged, while others stay massless. Peter Higgs reached the same conclusion independently weeks later and noted that the field should come with a new particle; Guralnik, Hagen and Kibble published a third version that year. The Brout–Englert–Higgs mechanism became the cornerstone of the electroweak theory and of the Standard Model, which also uses the same field to give mass to electrons and quarks.

Confirming it took almost fifty years and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. On 4 July 2012 the ATLAS and CMS experiments announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, with Englert and Higgs in the audience. The mechanism explains why matter can exist at all: without it electrons would be massless, would fly off at the speed of light and could never form atoms. It completed the most precisely tested theory in science, the framework for all of modern particle physics. Englert and Higgs shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics; Brout had died in 2011.

Why it matters

The Brout–Englert–Higgs mechanism explains why atoms, and therefore everything around us, can exist, and it completed the Standard Model on which all of modern particle physics is built.

About François Englert

Belgian physicist who survived the Holocaust as a hidden child and in 1964, with Robert Brout, showed how particles get mass, confirmed by the Higgs boson at CERN in 2012. Nobel Prize 2013.

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François Englert

1932–2026 · Theoretical physics

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