François Englert

François Englert was born on 6 November 1932 in Etterbeek, Brussels, Belgium. His parents were Polish Jews who had emigrated to Belgium in 1924 with his elder brother, then a few months old. In his Nobel autobiography Englert wrote that they came from a simple family, were looking for a better economic life and were escaping an antisemitic environment. They set up a textile shop and had achieved a decent life by May 1940, when Nazi Germany invaded Belgium.

Englert was seven and, as he later wrote, quite aware of the situation. Persecution came gradually. After about two years he was compelled to wear the Star of David, and a few months later deportations began. To improve his chances of survival he was separated from his parents, who hid in a place unknown to him.

He was taken in by Camille and Louise Jourdan, owners of a cafe-restaurant in Lustin, a village in the Ardennes. Their daughter Yvonne introduced him to music and the piano. After a denunciation the family fled to Annevoie, where they were reunited and stayed until the end of the war. The local priest, Warnon, presented them to villagers as Christians and baptised the young François so he could attend the Catholic college Notre-Dame de Bellevue in Dinant, while his brother was enrolled at a seminary school in a fake cassock. Over the war years Englert lived in orphanages and children's homes in Dinant, Lustin, Stoumont and Annevoie-Rouillon, towns later liberated by the United States Army.

His parents and brother survived, but their entire family in Poland was murdered. Englert recorded a testimony for the USC Shoah Foundation and paid tribute in his Nobel autobiography to the people who hid him, writing that without them he would not be here to tell the story.

After the war Englert returned to secondary school. Although memories of the war haunted his nightmares, he did well and developed interests in literature, music and mathematics. His mathematics teacher recommended polytechnic studies for their extended mathematics programme, and his parents encouraged the same path.

He graduated in electromechanical engineering from the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) in 1955. Realising that his interest lay less in practical applications than in the theoretical structure beneath them, he decided to learn physics. Working as an assistant in the polytechnic department to pay his way, he earned a master's degree in physics in 1958 and a PhD in physical sciences in 1959, both at the ULB.

In 1959, on the strength of early papers in condensed matter physics, Englert was offered a two-year post at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, as research associate to the young professor Robert Brout. He later became an assistant professor there. The two worked on ferromagnetism, superconductivity and the statistical theory of phase transitions, and the meeting began a collaboration and friendship that lasted until Brout's death.

Englert was offered a professorship at Cornell but missed Europe and returned to Belgium in the autumn of 1961. Brout, with a Guggenheim fellowship, joined him in Brussels with his family, then resigned from Cornell, settled permanently at the ULB and took Belgian nationality. From 1980 the two co-headed the theoretical physics group at the ULB.

Inspired by Yoichiro Nambu's work on spontaneous symmetry breaking, Brout and Englert published "Broken Symmetry and the Mass of Gauge Vector Mesons" in Physical Review Letters in 1964. They showed that gauge vector fields, abelian and non-abelian, could acquire mass if empty space were endowed with a structure like that found in material systems such as ferromagnets. Peter Higgs independently reached essentially the same result, and Gerald Guralnik, Carl Hagen and Tom Kibble published a related paper later in 1964. Physical Review Letters later recognised all three papers as milestone papers. The mechanism became the building block of electroweak theory and of the Standard Model.

The ULB group that Brout and Englert founded worked on strong interactions and quark confinement, general relativity and cosmology. There they introduced the idea of a primordial exponential expansion of the universe, later called inflation, and Englert, Brout and Edgard Gunzig won the 1978 Gravity Research Foundation essay prize for "The Causal Universe". Englert also worked on fractal structures, supergravity (including a 1982 paper on spontaneous compactification of eleven-dimensional supergravity), string theory and infinite Kac-Moody algebras. He considered the conflict between general relativity and quantum theory the most important problem in fundamental physics.

In 1984 he was first appointed a Sackler Professor by Special Appointment in the School of Physics and Astronomy at Tel Aviv University. He became professor emeritus at the ULB in 1998 and in 2011 joined Chapman University's Institute for Quantum Studies in California as a distinguished visiting professor. On 4 July 2012 the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider announced the discovery of the boson predicted by the mechanism, and Englert visited CERN several times afterwards.

Englert's Nobel autobiography states that he was married to Mira Nikomarow. He had five children: Michèle, Anne and Georges from a first marriage to Esther Dujardin, and Sarah and Hélène from a second marriage to Danielle Vindal. He had one elder brother, who survived the war with the family; his name has not been widely published.

Throughout his life Englert spoke of his debt to the families and clergy who hid him during the Holocaust, naming Camille, Louise and Yvonne Jourdan and the priest Warnon. He kept a lifelong love of music first sparked by Yvonne Jourdan's piano lessons. Colleagues described him as modest, polite, cultured and warm. He was honorary president of the Institut Jonathas, a Belgian institute that paid tribute to him after his death.

Englert was cautious about popularising his work. Asked by RTBF whether he could explain the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism in two minutes, he replied that it was impossible, and the broadcaster noted that he feared being misunderstood.

Scientifically, he regarded the reconciliation of Einstein's general relativity with quantum theory as the central unsolved problem, writing that overcoming the conflict would amount to correcting a conceptual mistake that might change our understanding of nature at all scales. He remained attached to the early inflationary scenario he developed with Brout, which he described as possibly the conceptually correct one. At the 2011 Solvay Conference he voiced scepticism about multiverse reasoning built on eternal inflation and the string landscape, arguing that the quantum mechanics of horizons was not understood.

He insisted on crediting Robert Brout, who died before the Nobel Prize was awarded, and wrote that their friendship was unaffected even when their research interests diverged.

The Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism explains how the W and Z bosons that carry the weak force acquire mass while the photon stays massless, uniting short-range and long-range interactions in one theory. It is one of the foundations of the Standard Model. The 2012 discovery of the associated boson at CERN opened a new field of research that the ATLAS and CMS experiments continue to pursue, with the High-Luminosity LHC and future colliders expected to probe physics beyond the Standard Model.

Englert was the only Belgian to receive the Nobel Prize in Physics. With his death, all of the original proposers of the mechanism in Brussels and Edinburgh had died: Brout in 2011, Higgs in 2024 and Englert in 2026. CERN described him as conversing with colleagues with the courtesy and tact for which he was well known. Physicist John Ellis said he would remember Englert's modest and polite demeanour despite his justified pride in his ground-breaking work. The ULB said his work and thought would continue to inspire generations of researchers and students.

1978: First Prize, Gravity Research Foundation essay contest (with Robert Brout and Edgard Gunzig) for "The Causal Universe". 1982: Francqui Prize in exact sciences. 1997: High Energy and Particle Physics Prize of the European Physical Society (with Brout and Peter Higgs). 2004: Wolf Prize in Physics (with Brout and Higgs). 2010: J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics, American Physical Society (with Guralnik, Hagen, Kibble, Higgs and Brout). 2013: Prince of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research (with Higgs and CERN). 2013: Ennobled as a baron by Royal Decree of King Albert II of Belgium, 8 July 2013. 2013: Nobel Prize in Physics, shared with Peter Higgs, "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles".

Key papers include "Broken Symmetry and the Mass of Gauge Vector Mesons" (with Robert Brout, Physical Review Letters 13, 1964), "The Causal Universe" (with Brout and Edgard Gunzig, 1978), "Spontaneous compactification of eleven-dimensional supergravity" (Physics Letters B, 1982) and "A brief course in spontaneous symmetry breaking" (2002). His Nobel Lecture, delivered in Stockholm in December 2013, was titled "The BEH mechanism and its scalar boson".

He appeared in many interviews, including Nobel Prize conversations about his breakthrough and his role models, CERN films in which he explains the equations of the mechanism, a KU Leuven Top Talk, and ULB TV coverage of his first day as a Nobel laureate and the Stockholm ceremony. A USC Shoah Foundation testimony records his wartime experience.

François Englert died on 18 June 2026 in Uccle, Brussels, at the age of 93. His family announced the death to RTBF on 19 June, and CERN, the ULB, the Nobel Prize organisation and the CMS Collaboration published tributes. The cause of death has not been made public. The ULB Faculty of Sciences announced that his funeral would take place on 27 June 2026 at 9:30 on rue du Silence in Uccle.