Prize Recipient

Francois Englert
Universite Libre de Bruxelles

Citation:

"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"

Background:

Englert François received his diplôme d'ingénieur in Civil Electricien-Mécanicien from the Université Libre de Bruxelles in 1955, his licencié in physics in 1958 and his doctorate in 1959. François did his post doctoral research at Cornell from 1959 to 1961 before returning to the Université Libre de Bruxelles. He lectured there until 1964 when he assumed the position of a full time professor at the university. In 1980 he became the director of the Theoretical Physics Group until 1998 and is now professor emeritus at the university.

His research interests range among the fields of Solid state physics, Statistical mechanics, Field Theory, Gravity, Supergravity, Cosmology and different approaches to Quantum Gravity. His present research is centered on Kac-Moody approaches to gravity and supergravities and on the quantum significance of event horizons.

François's past honors include the 1977 A. Wetrems Prize in Mathematical and Physical Sciences for his work on spontaneous symmetry breaking in elementary particle physics," the first award of the International Gravity Contestin 1978, for his work introducing the inflation mechanism in cosmology, the 1982 Francqui Prize, the 1997 High Energy and Particle Physics Prize, 2004 Wolf Prize in Physics and honorary degrees from the Université de Mons-Hainaut and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

Selection Committee:

R. Sekhar Chivukula, Chair, S. Dawson, A. Smirnov, U. Baur, S.J. Brodsky