Robert Brout
| Robert Brout | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
June 14, 1928 New York City, USA |
| Died | May 3, 2011 (aged 82) Brussels, Belgium |
| Nationality | Belgian |
| Fields |
statistical mechanics particle physics cosmology |
| Institutions |
Universite Libre de Bruxelles University of Rochester Cornell University |
| Alma mater |
New York University (BS) Columbia University (PhD) |
| Known for |
quantum field theory symmetry breaking Higgs boson Higgs mechanism cosmic inflation |
| Notable awards |
Sakurai Prize Wolf Prize in Physics (2004) |
Robert Brout (/braʊt/; June 14, 1928 – May 3, 2011) was a Belgian theoretical physicist who made significant contributions in elementary particle physics. He was a Professor of Physics at Université Libre de Bruxelles where he had created, together with François Englert, the Service de Physique Théorique.
After receiving his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1953 Brout joined Cornell University as faculty. In 1959 François Englert visiting from Belgium spent two years at Cornell as a research associate with Brout. Brout and Englert became close friends and collaborators, and in 1961 when Englert returned to Belgium Brout followed him and spent the rest of his professional life at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, and ultimately acquired Belgian citizenship.
In 1964, Brout, in collaboration with Englert, discovered how mass can be generated for gauge particles in the presence of a local abelian and non-abelian gauge symmetry. This was demonstrated by them, both classically and quantum mechanically, successfully avoiding theorems initiated by J. Goldstone while indicating that the theory would be renormalizable. Similar ideas have been developed in condensed matter physics.
Peter Higgs and Gerald Guralnik, C. R. Hagen, and Tom Kibble came to the same conclusion as Brout and Englert. The three papers written on this boson discovery by Higgs, Brout and Englert, and Guralnik, Hagen, Kibble were each recognized as milestone papers by Physical Review Letters 50th anniversary celebration. While each of these famous papers took similar approaches, the contributions and differences between the 1964 PRL symmetry breaking papers is noteworthy. This work showed that the particles that carry the weak force acquire their mass through interactions with an all-pervasive field that is now known as the Higgs field, and that the interactions occur via particles that are widely known as Higgs bosons. As yet, these Higgs bosons had not been observed experimentally; however, most physicists believed that they exist. On July 4, 2012, it was announced at CERN that a new particle, "consistent with a Higgs boson", had been discovered with 5 sigma confidence in the mass region around 125-126 GeV. In 2013 Englert and Higgs were to receive the Nobel Prize in Physics for their prediction.
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