Robert Brout

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Robert Brout (1964)
Kibble , Guralnik , Hagen , Englert and Brout at the 2010 Sakurai Prize

Robert Brout (born June 14, 1928 in New York , † May 3, 2011 in Linkebeek ) was an American - Belgian physicist .

Life

Brout studied in New York and Columbia (USA) and was assistant professor at Cornell University from 1958 to 1960 . From 1961 he worked at the Université libre de Bruxelles (Free University of Brussels) and became a professor there in 1966. He took Belgian citizenship .

In the 1950s Brout dealt with the many-particle theory of the solid (excitations in electron gas models, among others) and statistical mechanics . His book Phase Transitions was published in 1965 before the field of phase transitions was revolutionized in the 1960s. On August 31, 1964, Brout and François Englert published a mechanism that explains the short range of the weak force by introducing a massive vector boson . The mechanism of mass generation introduced therein later became known as the Higgs mechanism. Just a few days later, on September 15, a similar work by Peter Higgs appeared . The boson is called the Brout-Englert-Higgs particle after the three physicists, but is mostly abbreviated as the Higgs boson . In their work from 1964, Brout and Englert also showed how the electromagnetic and the weak force can be united by so-called “ spontaneous symmetry breaking ”.

Later Brout also dealt with cosmological inflation , with quantum gravity and black holes . For this research he received the Gravity Research Foundation 1st Award in 1977 .

In 1960 he became a Sloan Research Fellow . In 1997 Brout, Englert and Higgs were honored with the High Energy Physics Prize of the European Physical Society and in 2004 with the Wolf Prize . In 2005 Brout and Englert received honorary doctorates from the Free University of Brussels. In 2010 he was honored with the Sakurai Prize along with the other discoverers of the Higgs mechanism .

Brout was married and had three children.

Web links

Commons : Robert Brout  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ François Englert: Robert Brout . In: Physics Today . tape 64 , no. 8 , 2011, p. 63 , doi : 10.1063 / PT.3.1225 (English).
  2. ↑ Brout, Englert, Broken Symmetry and the Mass of Gauge Vector Mesons . In: Physical Review Letters. Volume 13, 1964, pp. 321-323
personal data
SURNAME Brout, Robert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American-Belgian physicist
DATE OF BIRTH June 14, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH new York
DATE OF DEATH May 3, 2011
Place of death Linkebeek