Published 2026-06-19 23.51
The Belgian particle physicist François Englert, who received the Nobel Prize in 2013 for his work on the Higgs particle, has died at the age of 93.
Englert, who died on Thursday, received the Nobel Prize together with Briton Peter Higgs for their theories on how particles get their mass. Already in 1964, they both independently came up with the same theory, which, however, was only confirmed in 2012 at the Swiss nuclear research institute Cern.
“It is with great sadness that we announce that the Belgian theoretical physicist François Englert has passed away at the age of 93,” Cern writes on Facebook.
When Englert received the Nobel Prize, he told the media that his work had always consisted of “seeking an understanding, a rational comprehensibility of the world”.
The Higgs particle is considered by physicists to be the cornerstone of the fundamental structure of matter.
