François Englert

François Englert is a Belgian theoretical physicist who shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for work predicting the Brout–Englert–Higgs mechanism.

Robert Brout: Robert Brout was a Belgian-American theoretical physicist who co-developed the mechanism now known as the Brout–Englert–Higgs mechanism. Englert and Brout jointly published the 1964 paper proposing how gauge bosons could acquire mass.
Brout–Englert–Higgs mechanism: The Brout–Englert–Higgs mechanism explains how gauge bosons acquire mass through spontaneous symmetry breaking in a gauge theory. This is the central theoretical contribution associated with Englert’s 1964 work.
1964 Brout–Englert paper: The 1964 Brout–Englert paper proposed that gauge fields can acquire mass through spontaneous symmetry breaking. This publication presented Englert and Brout’s joint formulation of the mechanism.
Standard Model: The Standard Model is the quantum field theory describing known elementary particles and three of their fundamental interactions. Its electroweak sector incorporates the mechanism Englert helped establish.
Peter Higgs: Peter Higgs was a British theoretical physicist whose 1964 work independently described a mechanism that gives particles mass. His independent paper supplied the name most widely attached to the mechanism Englert and Brout had also proposed.
Spontaneous symmetry breaking: Spontaneous symmetry breaking occurs when a system’s ground state has less symmetry than its governing laws. The mechanism uses a symmetry-breaking vacuum state to generate particle masses.
1964 Higgs papers: Peter Higgs’s 1964 papers developed a relativistic theory in which spontaneous symmetry breaking gives particles mass. These independent papers advanced the same central idea and established a parallel route to it.
W and Z bosons: The W and Z bosons are the massive gauge bosons that mediate the weak interaction. Their masses are explained by the mechanism’s symmetry-breaking structure.
Gerard 't Hooft: Gerard 't Hooft is a Dutch theoretical physicist whose work established the renormalizability of non-Abelian gauge theories with spontaneous symmetry breaking. His results helped make the framework containing Englert’s mechanism mathematically viable.
Higgs field: The Higgs field is a scalar field whose nonzero vacuum value contributes to the masses of elementary particles. Its nonzero value is the field-theoretic basis of the mechanism Englert helped propose.

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