Slashdot Mirror
LHC Data Continues To Disagree With Supersymmetry
decora writes "Pallab Ghosh of the BBC reports on another piece of evidence hitting the beleaguered Supersymmetry community. Scientists at the Lepton Photon conference in Mumbai, India confirmed that extra levels of B-Meson decay have not been found in the LHC beauty experiment. Coming on the heels of a March report in Nature, this news seems to reinforce what many have suspected all along. Dark Matter is probably not explainable through massive shadow particles like squarks and selectrons, and for all practical purposes, the Supersymmetric Extension of the Standard Model of Physics is dead."
So I clicked on the wikipedia link for supersymmetric extension and tried to read the first three paragraphs.
I encountered these: "supersymmetric partners, the weak scale, the hierarchy problem, quantum corrections, a fermionic superpartner, superparticles, squarks, gluinos, neutralinos, sleptons, R-parity, explicit soft supersymmetry breaking operators, large flavor changing neutral currents and electric dipole moments."
I always knew I wanted to be diagonal in flavor space to make the new CP violating phases vanish.
There is something deeply disturbing in the heads of physicists...
Sounds like it's time for another rethink then. Einstein got his insights from observing things in the real world, a lot of modern theory seems to be based on looking at Math. Maybe it's time to spend some time in the physical world again and to step away from the Platonic realm and see if something sparks some inspiration.
First of all, Einstein was famous for doing very clever thought experiments. Many of his ideas about special relativity came from thinking about how objects should behave if they tried to chase light. Second, the ideas of supersymmetry in fact come from inspiration of what we see in reality. In particular, supersymmetry has been posited to explain a number of different strange results, most importantly the apparent discrepancy of dark matter (that is, that the universe seem to have a lot of mass that we can't see).
I, for one, wonder what we might learn if we try to model things using integer math instead of the often rounded real numbers that seem to be popular. Of course, with the numbers being so large you run into factoring issues pretty quickly but hey, that's what quantum computers are for right? :)
We use the real numbers to model things because they do a really good job. One could try to just model a universe where the base field was the rational numbers (that is, ratios of integers) but that would have a lot of problems. For example, you won't be able to make a square with a diagonal connecting two corners. Moreover, for most purposes, calculations that can be done in the reals can be done with limits of rational numbers (in fact one way of rigorously defining the real numbers defines real numbers as special limits of rationals called Cauchy sequences. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauchy_sequence. I'm not at all sure why you think the difficulty of factoring integers is relevant in this context. For most practical calculations, you very rarely need to factor integers. Moreover, while it is true that quantum computers can in theory factor integers quickly using Shor's algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor's_algorithm, for all we know it might be possible for standard computers to factor quickly. Moreover, the models we use to talk about quantum computing rely very heavily on the real numbers which you aren't happy with.
How long did they think the world was flat again? And how long before that did they believe thunder was anger from the gods? And how long before that was fire worshiped as magic?
About until the very most primitive scientists, until a semi-reasonable scientific explanation was found, and about the same as the other two, respectively. Seriously, one of the very first people to attempt science (the Greeks) knew the Earth was round, most of them knew thunder was a natural phenomenon but couldn't explain it, and they established fire as one of the four elements of nature (again: not magic but we just don't know how it works quite yet.)
However, if an experiment created explicitly for (among other things) confirmation or refutation of Supersymmetry not only doesn't discover it, but discovers absolutely no sign of it and in fact contradicts it (which I believe these results do), then chances are it's time to go back to the drawing board. Or the math board, in this case.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Around 240 BC, Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth to an error of less than 2%.
Please don't confuse the "Everybody thought the world was flat until Colombus!" crowd with facts. Telling them the ancient Greeks knew they were living on a sphere (from the shape of the shadow of the earth on the moon) won't disturb their firmly held articles of faith at all.
I am a particle physicist (with no leanings for or against SUSY variants), and I have to agree totally. Calling SUSY "all but dead" is absurd, at this point.
1. Minimal SUSY has had theoretical difficulties (without needing experimental difficulties) for more than a decade now.
2. The SUSY ecosystem is really quite vast. In some sense, it's a shame that it has such a simple name/acronym. Minimal SUSY is really a rather uninteresting modification to the Standard Model, anyhow.
3. The potential for the LHC to shed light on whole ranges of SUSY models (with or without an answer regarding the Higgs field) is understood by physicists to be something which is more likely to be tested (read: ruled out) at the 14 TeV center-of-mass scale.
The decision run the LHC for two years and *then* upgrade in 2013 was made primarily because of the potential to bracket the Higgs at ~ 4 to 5 sigma with ~ 5 fb^-1 of collision data. Anyone who attended (or read slides from) Chamonix 2010 or 2011 can see this rather plainly.
It's not quite like that. We know that if this class of theory is correct the particles in question MUST exist and that they will be detectable in the given energy range by a known signature. They aren't there.
So whatever theory is more correct will either not predict these particles or will predict them at an energy we have yet to reach.
They went sailing for the edge of the world so they could hold a mirror over the edge and prove there was a turtle holding it up. Instead, they went all the way around and came back to the starting point, so the flat earth theory must be discarded.
Has Netcraft confirmed that the model is dead?