Belgian physicist François Englert, co-discoverer of Higgs boson, dies at 93

Belgian theoretical physicist François Englert, a Nobel Prize winner for formulating the existence of the Higgs boson, died in Brussels at the age of 93, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced on social media.

Englert, born in 1932, initially trained as an electromechanical engineer before earning a doctorate in physics from the Free University of Brussels. There, he collaborated with Robert Brout to theorize the existence of an elusive subatomic particle in 1964, crucial for understanding why particles have mass.

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the discovery of a theoretical mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of the mass of subatomic particles

This particle, later named the Higgs boson, took 48 years to experimentally prove. The Brout-Englert-Higgs field's existence was demonstrated in 2012 through experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. Englert and Peter Higgs, who independently proposed a similar hypothesis, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013 for their theoretical contributions to the origin of particle mass.

While often overshadowed in public perception by Peter Higgs, Englert himself noted in an interview that the naming convention wasn't entirely accurate but secondary to the scientific achievement. The Higgs boson is a cornerstone of the Standard Model of particle physics, explaining the fundamental interactions and properties of matter.

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that denomination did not seem entirely appropriate to him, although that is not what is really important