On 23rd April, the University of Warsaw will confer the prestigious title of Doctor Honoris Causa upon Prof. François Englert, an outstanding scientist, a professor emeritus at the Université libre de Bruxelles, The Nobel Prize laureate in Physics 2013.

Prof. François Englert is a Belgian physicist with Polish roots – his parents emigrated from Poland in 1924. He received degrees in electromechanical engineering and physics from the Université Libre de Bruxelle (Free University of Brussels; ULB), before obtaining a doctorate in physics from the ULB in 1959. Throughout his professional career he has been affiliated with the ULB.

Ground-breaking research

In 1964, Prof. François Englert and Prof. Robert Brout wrote a ground-breaking paper “Broken Symmetry and the Mass of Gauge Vector Mesons”. In 2013, together with Prof. Brout, he was awarded The Nobel Prize for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. In July 2012, with Prof. Englert and Prof. Higgs in attendance, the CERN scientists, detected an interesting signal probably from a Higgs boson with a mass of 125-126 giga-electron volts, thus confirming the existence of the Higgs particle.

Prof. Englert received many honours for his work, including the 1982 Francqui Prize for his contribution to the theoretical understanding of spontaneous symmetry breaking in the physics of fundamental interactions, where, with Prof. 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, the 1997 High Energy and Particle Physics Prize 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, the 2004 Wolf Prize in Physics by the Wolf Foundation for pioneering work that has led to the insight of mass generation, whenever a local gauge symmetry is realised asymmetrically in the world of sub-atomic particles, the 2010 J.J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics 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, the 2013 Prince of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research by the Prince of Asturias Foundation.

Prof. Englert’s cooperation with the scientists of the University of Warsaw has largely contributed to the development of innovative research work at the Faculty of Physics as well as the scientific education. In the 1970s and early 1980s, Stefan Pokorski, now professor of the UW Faculty of Physics, during his internship at the CERN had a chance to work with Prof. Englert. Over twenty doctoral theses of the Faculty of Physics are focused on the use the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism (BEH mechanism) in the Standard Model.