{"id":4696,"date":"2012-05-16T19:34:42","date_gmt":"2012-05-16T23:34:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=4696"},"modified":"2012-06-08T08:27:52","modified_gmt":"2012-06-08T12:27:52","slug":"the-smell-of-susy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=4696","title":{"rendered":"The Smell of SUSY"},"content":{"rendered":"

The implications of the failure to find SUSY at the LHC are beginning to sink into the particle physics community: the paradigm that dominated the subject for the past 30 years has collapsed in the face of experimental (non)-evidence, threatening to take down the life’s work of hundreds if not thousands of theorists. For some recent attempts to quantify what is going on, from some people with much more statistical expertise than me, see Philip Gibbs<\/a> and Tommaso Dorigo<\/a>. By now a significant number of SUSY analyses of the full 2011 dataset have been completed, with negative results. By the end of the year there will be more data, but just a factor of 2-3 more, at about 14% higher energy. To believe that these sorts of increases will turn no signal into a signal requires a willingness to engage in a rather large amount of wishful thinking. The 62% jump in 2014 to 6.5 TeV\/beam is more significant, but it’s hard to see an argument for why this should do the trick, and the wait for these results will be discouragingly long, probably until 2015. How many SUSY enthusiasts will keep the faith?<\/p>\n

A small number of theorists though still claim all is well, with one group producing a new paper claiming the full 5 inverse femtobarn results show Chanel No5 (fb^-1): The Sweet Fragrance of SUSY<\/a>. Last year the same authors were claiming to detect Profumo di SUSY<\/a> in the first inverse femtobarn, and argued that 5 times more data would be conclusive. To quantify the SUSY smells they are advertising, one can plot as a function of time their published predictions for the parameter $M_{1\/2}$ which determines the gluino mass. <\/p>\n

arXiv:1007.5100<\/a> 455 GeV (“Golden Point”)
\narXiv:1009.2981<\/a> 455-481 GeV (“Golden Strip”)
\narXiv:1111.0236<\/a> 512 GeV (“Universe F-U2”)
\narXiv:1111.4204<\/a> 518 GeV (“Profumo di SUSY”)
\narXiv:1203.1918<\/a> 610 GeV (“Aroma of Stops and Gluinos”)
\narXiv:1205.3052<\/a> 708 GeV (“The Sweet Fragrance of SUSY”)<\/p>\n

It’s rather easy to extrapolate to the future what these authors will be claiming the SUSY masses are, harder to extrapolate how they’ll be describing the smell. The rest of the particle physics community I suspect is already using very different terms for this.<\/p>\n

Update<\/strong>: According to this report<\/a> from Pheno 2012<\/p>\n

As pointed out by Rahmat Rahmat (yes, that’s his name\u2014in my notes I list him as Rahmat2<\/sup>) and Csaba Csaki, respectively from University of Mississippi and Cornell University, the LHC should have detected some signature of SUSY by now, especially if the MSSM is correct. As Csaki said, “SUSY is a wonderful woman who does not return my letters. It makes you wonder if she even exists!”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The implications of the failure to find SUSY at the LHC are beginning to sink into the particle physics community: the paradigm that dominated the subject for the past 30 years has collapsed in the face of experimental (non)-evidence, threatening … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-hype"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4696"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4696\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4708,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4696\/revisions\/4708"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}