The prize attracted ten nominations this year, including nominations from the USA, Italy, and the UK, and an unprecedented seven from Dutch universities. From these submissions, three finalists emerged:
- Silvester Borsboom (nominated by Sebastian de Haro)
- Thomas Vissers (nominated by Klaas Landsman)
- Alex Fleuren (nominated by Niels Martens)
The jury unanimously decided that Borsboom's thesis "Spontaneous Breaking of Global Gauge Symmetries in the Higgs mechanism" was exceptional. It stood out in terms of ambition, novelty, scope and philosophical significance.
On the winning thesis
Borsboom's thesis examines the Higgs mechanism - the argument that a certain kind of massless elementary particles (bosons) can become massive by spontaneous breaking of a gauge symmetry. This led to the experimental search for such particles (known as Higgs bosons) and their discovery by CERN was considered a keystone to the completion of the so-called Standard Model of elementary particles.
At the heart of his research is that gauge symmetries are usually regarded as symmetries in our description of physical systems, without empirical significance. Borsboom examines various open problems in this long-standing dispute with admirable care and presents significant novel contributions to their solution.
