Early September two of my PhD students will defend their PhD thesis at the Radboud University Nijmegen.

On Friday September 5 my PhD student Thijs van den Broek (supervised together with Wim Beenakker and promotor Ronald Kleiss) will defend his thesis “Supersymmetry and the Spectral Action: On a geometrical interpretation of the MSSM”. Thijs worked on the intersection between supersymmetry and noncommutative geometry, searching for a theory arising from noncommutative geometry that describes the MSSM, or something alike. More details on the defense can be found here, the contents of the thesis will appear soon on the arXiV.

Update: The full PhD thesis of Thijs van den Broek can be found online at http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.6751, and the corresponding arXiv-papers at http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.5982 , http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.5983 , http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.5984.

On Thursday September 11 my PhD student Jord Boeijink (promotor Klaas Landsman) will defend his thesis “Dirac operators, gauge systems and quantisation”. Jord worked on two subjects: one was the problem whether quantization commutes with reduction for gauge systems. More specifically, he analyzed the quantization of the cotangent bundle to a compact Lie group \(G\) with symmetries given by the adjoint action of \(G\). The second subject that Jord worked on was the extension of almost-commutative manifold to the topologically non-trivial case, and already appeared as the preprint arXiv:1405.5368. More details on the defense can be found here.