Description:

Title: The LHC Confronts Supersymmetry

Speaker: JoAnne Hewett, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Abstract: The Large Hadron Collider is providing our first clear view of the Terascale and is confronting our most cherished theories with data, in particular Supersymmetry.  Supersymmetry is a symmetry allowed by nature that extends the Poincare group and offers attractive solutions to many outstanding questions - if it exists at the Terascale - such as the dark matter puzzle, the weak hierarchy problem, and grand unification of the forces.  Most importantly, Terascale Supersymmetry yields testable predictions.  So far, LHC searches for Supersymmetry have come up short, and the newly discovered Higgs boson is surprisingly difficult to accommodate within the simplest Supersymmetry models. I will review the implications of the data for Supersymmetric models and offer a view towards their potential discovery at the forthcoming LHC run at design energy beginning in Spring 2015. In particular, I will show that a region of parameter space within the phenomenological Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model easily accomodates current data and has a promising discovery opportunity in the upcoming run, providing Nature has chosen this route.
 

Speaker Schedule

Host: Frank Petriello / Heidi Schellman

Keywords: Physics, Astronomy, colloquium