Robert Brout

Robert Brout was an American-born Belgian theoretical physicist specializing in elementary particle physics, who lived from 1928 to 2011. Working with Francois Englert, he discovered how mass can be generated for gauge particles in the presence of local abelian and non-abelian gauge symmetry, work foundational to understanding the Higgs mechanism and the Higgs boson, and he also contributed to cosmic inflation theory. He received the High Energy Particle Physics Prize in 1997, shared with Englert and Peter Higgs, and the J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics in 2010, shared with five colleagues. He received the Wolf Prize in Physics in 2004, shared with Englert and Higgs, for pioneering work leading to the insight of mass generation.