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Press release
Brussels, 8 October 2013
Nobel Prize for Physics goes to François Englert, emeritus professor at the Université
libre de Bruxelles, and Peter Higgs, University of Edinburgh
This Tuesday, 8 October 2013, the Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to the Belgian
François Englert, Université Libre de Bruxelles, and to the Brit Peter Higgs, University of
Edinburgh. Together with the late Robert Brout (also Université libre de Bruxelles), they
proposed in 1964 a theoretical mechanism that plays a key role in our understanding of the
universe. The ULB now has a count of 4 science-related Nobel Prizes (of the six awarded to
Belgians).
The Brout-Englert-Higgs boson implied by their theories had to wait nearly fifty years before
being discovered, in July 2012, by the CMS and ATLAS collaborations at the Large Hadron
Collider (LHC) at CERN (Geneva).
In 1964, Robert Brout and François Englert, immediately (and independently) followed by
Peter Higgs, authored an article in Physical Review Letters that relates the electromagnetic
force, with infinite range, to the "weak" interaction of radioactivity, with a range limited to an
atom's nucleus. A mechanism known as "spontaneous symmetry breaking" would indeed
unify these two types of interactions, by giving a mass to the particles carrying the weak
interaction. This mechanism would also, more generally, explain the origin of the mass of all
elementary constituents of matter, and thus provide a key element in the construction of the
"Standard Model" of elementary particles. This theory implies the existence of an auxiliary,
scalar particle: the Brout-Englert-Higgs (BEH) boson.
A graduate engineer with a PhD in physics from the Université libre de Bruxelles, François
Englert became a lecturer at the ULB in 1961, before gaining a full professorship in 1964.
From 1980 to 1998 (the year of his retirement), François Englert headed the ULB research
group of Theoretical Physics, of which he, now 81 years old, remains a frequent visitor.
In the course of his career, François Englert has been awarded a number of distinctions often in conjunction with his colleague and friend Robert Brout, who died in 2011: the
1 Francqui Prize (1982); the European Physical Society Prize (1997); the Wolf Prize in Physics
(2004); the J.J. Sakurai Prize of the American Physical Society (2010); and the Prince of
Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research (2013).
The ULB is also proud of the fact that its experimental particle physics team is very actively
involved in the CMS experiment, one of the two CERN that discovered the Brout-EnglertHiggs boson.
The award to a ULB professor of the Nobel Prize for Physics - the first ever awarded to a
Belgian - is no coincidence, given the ULB's long tradition of excellence in physics, as
evidenced by the awards it has gained in this field.
Yet the ULB's excellence in research is by no means limited to physics. In fundamental
science, the ULB has an outstanding reputation, as evidenced by the contributions of Robert
Brout and François Englert in theoretical physics, or those of Ilya Prigogine in theoretical
chemistry, which saw him gaining the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1977. In mathematics,
among ULB’s former students and professors, Jacques Tits has been awarded the Abel
Prize, and Pierre Deligne the Fields Medal and the Abel Prize. In medicine the ULB is proud
of two further Nobel Prizes, those awarded to Jules Bordet and Albert Claude.
Apart from these outstanding personalities, this success is to be attributed to the ULB's deep
attachment to freedom of research, as well as its exceptional international openness.
www.ulb.be/nobel
Photographs and videos available for the Press at http://bit.ly/ulb-nobel-presse
Press contacts:
Nancy Dath,
+32 (0)2 650 92 03 ou +32 (0) 473 97 22 56, [email protected]
2 François Englert
A few questions ....
This prize rewards a theory formulated back in 1964. Can you remember how it came
about?
François Englert: In 1961, Professor Robert Brout and I met Yoichiro Nambu at Cornell
University, the person responsible for introducing spontaneous symmetry breaking into
elementary particle theory and who went on to receive the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2008.
This put us on to studying the elementary particle theory. At that time, long-range forces (i.e.
forces acting on far distant objects) were well understood and some scientists thought that
one could thus understand the phenomena from the scale of an atom right up the limits of the
observable universe. However, the short-range forces acting at a nuclear and sub-nuclear
level remained a mystery. Using the symmetry breaking put forward by Nambu as our basis,
we built a mechanism generating short-range forces from long-range ones. This mechanism
worked by giving the particles transmitting these forces a mass. From a wider perspective, it
was able to generate mass from all the elementary constituents of matter. In 1964, convinced
of the logical consistency of our theory, even if we did not yet see all its precise implications,
we published our article in Physical Review Letters. A few weeks later, the Scotsman Peter
Higgs came up with the same mechanism. Out theory implies the existence of a particle, the
"Brout-Englert-Higgs boson" which CERN discovered last year. In 1967, this mechanism
became one of the key elements of the "Standard Model" of fundamental interactions
triggered by Steve Weinberg's electroweak theory.
You accompanied the "boson adventure" together with your colleague, Robert Brout,
for more than half a century.
François Englert: We first met back in 1959, in the United States, and very quickly became
friends. Our views on physics were very complementary: he had a more Anglo-Saxon
approach based primarily on an intuitive vision and later followed by theoretical underpinning,
while I had a more Latin approach, going from the formal to the vision. Most importantly, we
both saw physics and knowledge in general as a way of avoiding specialisation.
Unfortunately, my friend Robert Brout passed away in May 2011.
Physics, was it a clear path for you right from the start?
François Englert: Not really. I initially wanted to take up engineering, and thus enrolled at the
Ecole polytechnique de Bruxelles. During my studies, I found out what really interested me i.e. understanding the laws governing phenomena and not so much being able to make
technical use of them. After graduating, I took up physics and gained my PhD. During my
studies, I met the Frenchman, Pierre Aigrain, and became his assistant at the ULB. Together
with him, I authored my first article, entitled "Semiconductors". At that time, Professor Robert
Brout was looking for a researcher in his lab at Cornell University in the United States. He
asked Pierre Algrain for his advice and I ended up being invited. That was in 1959.
3 In 1961, you decided to return to the ULB
François Englert: Yes. At the end of my post-doctorate, Cornell University offered me a job,
but I turned it down - I missed Belgium. I returned to the ULB as a lecturer, followed by
Robert Brout. He loved European culture - he was a great fan of art - and he was married to
a European. So he decided to come to Brussels and ended up giving up his U.S. citizenship
in favour of the Belgian. From 1980 onwards, we jointly headed the research group of
Theoretical Physics in the Faculty of Science.
Even at the age of 81, you continue to come to your desk in the ULB. Are you still
tickled by scientific curiosity?
François Englert: Sure. You know, physics is a bit like a drug! I've always wanted to get fun
out of doing research, and this sees me choosing my subjects dependent on my curiosity
and the enjoyment I get from working together with certain colleagues. We are obviously no
longer in the Renaissance period, and knowledge has become so wide-ranging that it is
impossible to take in everything, but there's no need to read everything on a particular
subject to be interested in it. The important thing is above all to learn to distinguish the
important from the unimportant and then to delve down deeper.
The joy of scientific innovation is linked to a certain form of aesthetics, as in the artist.
Without being deistic, the researcher can find himself thinking: if I were God, how would I
have created things?
4 Curriculum Vitae
Date of birth: 6 November 1932
Nationality: Belgian
Education
1955
Belgium
1958
1959
Degree in Electrical-Mechanical Engineering, Université libre de Bruxelles,
Degree in Physical Sciences, Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
PhD in Physical Sciences, Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
Academic Career
1956-1959
1959-1960
1960-1961
1961-1964
1964-1998
1980-1998
Assistant, Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
Research Associate, Cornell University (Ithaca), USA
Assistant Professor, Cornell University (Ithaca), USA
Lecturer, Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
Professor, Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
Director (with Robert Brout) of the Theoretical Physics Service at the
Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
Scientific Awards
1977
A. Wetrems Prize in Mathematical and Physical Sciences awarded by the
Académie royale de Belgique “For his work on spontaneous symmetry
breaking in elementary particule physics".
1978
First Prize in the International Gravity Contest (with Robert Brout and Edgar
Gunzig) awarded by the Gravity Research Foundation for “The Causal
Universe”'. This work introduced for the first time the inflation mechanism in
cosmology.
1982
Francqui Prize, awarded by the Fondation Francqui once every three years in
exact sciences,
- “For his contribution to the theoretical understanding of spontaneous
symmetry breaking in the physics of fundamental interactions, where, with
Robert Brout, he was the first to show that spontaneous symmetry breaking in
gauge theories gives mass to the gauge particles",
- “For his extensive contributions in other domains, such as solid state physics,
statistical mechanics, quantum field theory, general relativity and cosmology",
- “For the originality and the fundamental importance of these achievements".
5 1997
High Energy and Particle Physics Prize (with Robert Brout and Peter W.
Higgs)
awarded by the European Physical Society “For formulating for the first time a
self-consistent theory of charged massive vector bosons which became the
foundation of the electroweak theory of elementary particles.”
2004
Wolf Prize in Physics (with Robert Brout and Peter W. Higgs) awarded by the
Wolf Foundation “For pioneering work that has led to the insight of mass
generation, whenever a local gauge symmetry is realized asymmetrically in
the world of sub-atomic particles.”
1988
Israel
Permanent Fellow, Sackler Institute of Advanced Studies, Tel Aviv University,
1992
Senior Professor by Special Appointment, Tel-Aviv University, Israel
2004
Honorary Doctorate, Université de Mons-Hainaut, Belgium
2005
Honorary Doctorate, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
2006
Honorary Member of the Solvay Institutes
2010
J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics (with Robert Brout, Gerald
S. Guralnik, Carl R. Hagen, Peter W. Higgs, Thomas W.B. Kibble) awarded by
the American Physical Society “For elucidation of the properties of
spontaneous symmetry breaking in four-dimensional relativistic gauge theory
and of the mechanism for the consistent generation of vector boson masses.”
2013
Prince of Asturias Technical and Scientific Research Award
Publications :
http://inspirehep.net/search?ln=en&ln=en&p=find+a+englert%2Cf&of=hb&action_sear
ch=Search&sf=&so=d&rm=&rg=25&sc=0
6 The ULB at CERN
No less than 608 institutes and universities from 113 different nations now make use of the
CERN facilities - and in particular the Large Hadron Collider or LHC, the largest such collider,
100 meters underground, inaugurated in 2008 and – to better understand the basic
components of matter and the forces to which they are subject.
The ULB – and more particularly the Faculty of Science’s Department of Experimental
Elementary Particle Physics– has been one of CERN’s partners since its creation in 1954.
Nearly half of the laboratory is presently working on the CMS experiment, one of the four
experiments at the LHC. This experiment brings together some 4300 researchers and
technicians from 179 universities and research institutes in 41 different countries.
The ULB researchers initially participated in designing and constructing the CMS
experiment’s central detector.
They were subsequently involved in preparing the statistical tools and algorithms used to
process the collected data – resulting from the collisions – as well as in preparing the
analyses via computer simulations. They are now involved in analysing the data collected at
the LHC, under conditions very similar to those found a fraction of a second after the Big
Bang - and thus in last summer’s fantastic discovery of the Brout-Englert-Higgs boson.
The existence of this scalar boson is a key factor in validating the process of mass acquiring
by elementary constituents of matter, and thus the Standard Model of particle physics.
Nevertheless, the Standard Model still leaves a lot of questions open, in particular the nature
of dark matter, the asymmetry of matter and antimatter in the Universe, the possible
existence of additional space-time dimensions, etc., for which we desperately need new
physics.
At CERN, the ULB researchers are exploring this probable “new physics” in various
directions: by studying in detail the characteristics of the Brout-Englert-Higgs boson; by
precisely measuring certain processes and attempting to detect deviations vis-à-vis the
Standard Model predictions; by researching new particles not found in the Standard Model
such as particles predicted by grand unification theories or models involving additional spatial
dimensions; or by looking for other new and more massive scalar bosons.
The Laboratory is also preparing the "Phase 2" of the LHC that should, from 2022 onwards,
allow multiplying by a factor of 10 the number of events recorded. This will in turn force
making major improvements to the detector, the electronics, etc. in order to withstand the
extreme operating conditions.
For more information:
Barbara Clerbaux, ULB, + 32 (0)2 629 32 14 or [email protected]
Laurent Favart, ULB, + 32 (0)2 629 32 07 ou Laurent. [email protected]
7 The ULB has a tally of 4 Nobel Prizes in the scientific field and one Nobel Peace Prize
The ULB has a tally of 4 Nobel Prizes in the scientific field (of the 6 awarded to Belgium):
Jules Bordet (1919), Albert Claude (1974), Ilya Prigogine (1977) and François Englert
(2013). And one Nobel Peace Prize: Henri La Fontaine (1913).
Jules Bordet (1870-1961) was the first Belgian scientist to be awarded the Nobel Prize in
Physiology and Medicine in 1919. A professor of bacteriology at the ULB and dean of the
Faculty of Medicine, he was a pioneer in the field of microbiology: after having discovered,
together with Octave Gengou, the microbe responsible for whooping cough, he discovered
the microbe at the origin of avian diphtheria and the mycoplasma of bovine
pleuropneumonia.
The scientific director of the Jules Bordet Institute and a ULB professor, biochemist Albert
Claude pioneered molecular virology. In 1974, he was awarded – together with Christian de
Duve and George Emil Palade – the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine – for their
discoveries relating to cell structure and function.
In 1977, Ilya Prigogine (1917-2003) received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Though
originally from Russia, he pursued his whole study career in Belgium, becoming known for
his work on dissipative structures and complex systems. A professor of chemistry at the
Faculty of Science, he made a significant contribution to a better understanding of the
irreversible processes involved in out-of-equilibrium chemical, physical and biological
systems.
2013 has now seen François Englert (born in 1932) receiving the Nobel Prize for Physics
for having postulated, together with his colleague Robert Brout, similarly a ULB professor,
and - independently - the Scotsman Peter Higgs, the existence of a new elementary particle,
a "scalar boson", explaining the origin of mass of elementary constituents of matter in the
universe.
Apart from these scientific prizes, the ULB is proud of the Nobel Peace Prize awarded in
1913 to a former student of the Faculty of Law, Henri La Fontaine (1854-1943), for the role
he played in promoting international law in the management of conflicts between nations.
Last but not least, the ULB counts among its former students and teachers two
mathematicians who have gained the highest awards in the field of mathematics: Jacques
Tits (born in 1930), awarded the Abel Prize in 2008, and Pierre Deligne (born in 1944),
awarded the Fields Medal in 1978 and the Abel Prize in 2013.
8