What is François Englert known for?
I am best known for the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism, which I developed with Robert Brout in 1964. This mechanism explains how elementary particles acquire mass through spontaneous symmetry breaking in gauge theories. The beautiful idea that symmetry can be spontaneously broken leads to a field—now called the Higgs field—that permeates space. Particles interact with this field, and their mass depends on the strength of that interaction. This work was confirmed by the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN in 2012, for which I shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013. The mechanism is elegant because it emerges from a simple requirement: that gauge invariance, a fundamental symmetry of nature, must be preserved even when particles have mass.
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