Three of the leading figures in HEP theory have today or recently spoken about their current view of SUSY in light of the negative LHC results, here’s a report:<\/p>\n
Both Arkani-Hamed and Maldacena talked not about their own work, but about the Higgs, with Maldacena emphasizing the importance of gauge symmetry, Arkani-Hamed the constraints imposed by unitarity and Lorentz invariance. At the end of his talk, Arkani-Hamed gave a big advertisement for SUSY, with a new and somewhat bizarre argument I hadn’t heard before. He argued that since QM + special relativity imply that elementary particles must have spin 0,1\/2,1,3\/2,2, and until recently 0 and 3\/2 were missing, the fact that 0 (the Higgs) has now been seen implies (by the “totalitarian principle” that everything that can happen must happen) that the next thing to be discovered will require a spin 3\/2 particle and this needs SUSY. Of the various weak arguments put forward for SUSY, this seems to me to be the weakest yet.<\/li>\n
No mention was made of the similar pre-LHC predictions (see here<\/a> and here<\/a>) which had the Higgs at around 113 GeV, gluinos at 700 GeV or so, and squarks lighter than this, all of which have been shown to be radically mistaken. For some perspective on this on an even longer time scale, take a look at this 1984 survey article, Supersymmetry – spectroscopy of the future? : or of the present?<\/a>. It gives much the same enthusiastic motivation for SUSY that we still get in all SUSY talks, with Ellis optimistic that the latest data had hints of SUSY with sparticle masses around 40 GeV (“nicely compatible” with the recent discovery of a 40 GeV top quark…).<\/li>\n Update<\/strong>: More at Nature<\/a> about SUSY’s problems and quotes from its defenders.<\/p>\n Update<\/strong>: Over at the Simons Foundation web-site, there’s an excellent new article about the SUSY debate<\/a> by Natalie Wolchover. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Three of the leading figures in HEP theory have today or recently spoken about their current view of SUSY in light of the negative LHC results, here’s a report: At the IAS recently, Nima Arkani-Hamed spoke on The Inevitability of … Continue reading