Saturday, August 27, 2011

SUSY In Deeper Trouble

Supersymmetry is already not having a good year with the current non-discovery at the LHC from the ATLAS and CMS detectors. This theory is already in trouble with those results. Now it is in a deeper trouble, because another LHC detector, LHCb, has announced its result, and NADA!

This failure to find indirect evidence of supersymmetry, coupled with the fact that two of the collider's other main experiments have not yet detected supersymmetic particles, means that the simplest version of the theory has in effect bitten the dust.
 If this is true, this could be one of the most spectacular failure in theoretical physics in quite a while. A whole "cottage industry" has been built around supersymmetry, and many students have gotten PhDs in it. But more importantly, let this be a lesson to anyone coming up with theories that have yet to be verified, or can't be verified by any reasonable means in the foreseeable future. You hear that, string theorists?

Zz.

1 comment:

Steve said...

Let us not conflate the whole SUSY parameter space with the constrained MSSM. That is just hyperbolic polemics, which has no place in real physics.