François Englert, Nobel physicist behind the Higgs mechanism, dies at 93

François Englert, the Belgian theoretical physicist who shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for explaining how elementary particles acquire mass, died on June 18, 2026, in Uccle, near Brussels, at the age of 93, CERN announced. Born in 1932 in Etterbeek, Brussels, to Jewish shopkeepers, Englert lived through the Nazi occupation of Belgium in hiding with his family. He later described himself as a nonconformist and a nonbeliever, and often spoke of science as a defense against the irrational ideas that had devastated Europe in his childhood.

After first training as a civil engineer, Englert earned a doctorate in physics at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) in 1959 and went to Cornell University as an assistant to the American physicist Robert Brout. The two became lifelong friends and collaborators, and Brout followed him back to Brussels, where they led the university's theoretical physics group together from 1961.

In 1964 Englert and Brout showed that the force-carrying particles of nature could gain mass through their interaction with an invisible field filling the whole universe. Working independently, the British physicist Peter Higgs proposed the same mechanism and pointed out that the field should come with its own particle. The idea, now known as the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism, solved a central puzzle in the theory that unites electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force and became a cornerstone of the Standard Model of particle physics. Nearly half a century later, in 2012, the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider discovered the Higgs boson, confirming the theory. Englert and Higgs received the Nobel Prize the following year; Brout had died in 2011.

Englert continued to work at ULB, becoming professor emeritus in 1998, and spent his later career on the deep problem of reconciling general relativity with quantum theory. He visited CERN several times after the discovery, where colleagues remembered his courtesy and tact. The particle his work predicted remains at the center of research at the LHC and of plans for future colliders.