Silvester Borsboom wins two prizes for his master thesis

In the fall of 2024, Silvester Borsboom, a PhD student a the RCNP, won two prizes for his master thesis titled Spontaneous Breaking of Global Gauge Symmetries in the Higgs Mechanism. In his thesis, Silvester argued that the Higgs mechanism should be understood not as an instance of local gauge symmetry breaking, but instead as a case of global gauge symmetry breaking. Arguing for this idea required a detailed investigation into the physical nature of global gauge symmetries as opposed to local ones, thereby combining physical, mathematical and philosophical reasoning, i.e. working in the Traingle that is symbolised in the RCNP logo.

The first prize was the KHMW (royal Dutch society for sciences) young talent graduation award for theoretical physics.