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Higgs Data Offers Joy and Pain For Particle Physicists
scibri writes "So now that we've pretty much found the Higgs Boson, what's next? Well: 'There's going to be a huge massacre of theoretical ideas in the next couple of years,' predicts Joe Lykken, a theoretical physicist at Fermilab. The data has shored up the standard model, but technicolor is dead and supersymmetry is starting to look pretty ropey now. Theorists are now poking at the mathematical chinks in the standard theory in the hopes of being the first to find a deeper truth about how the Universe works."
Every new discovery of the past few decades has supposedly "killed" SUSY, but every time it makes a comeback with a modification to avert whatever problem the observation caused. Other theories do the same, to a slightly lesser extent.
I don't see why Technicolor is dead. The Nature article makes the claim that it's because Technicolor is Higgsless, but that's something of a falsehood. Technicolor lacks an elementary Higgs, because the role played by the elementary Higgs in the Standard Model is instead played by a composite particle. As far as I can tell it's perfectly possible that the bosonic state at 125GeV is a composite rather than elementary Higgs.
(FD: I'm a PhD student with a thesis area based around technicolor)
Uh, I hope you realize that Dark Matter doesn't have anything to do with the universe being "dark". Besides, it's not dark in the microwave band anyway. The Dark Matter "bandwagon" is trying to account for 23% of the mass of the universe which does not interact with the electromagnetic field, and hence is "dark". Much of this is hot dark matter consisting of neutrinos (generated by the conversion of a proton into a neutron) and antineutrinos (generated by the conversion of a neutron into a proton). These reactions were known in the Twentieth Century. Neutrinos have a very low rest mass, and travel at just under the speed of light. So infrequent are their interactions with normal matter that a neutrino would be able to pass through a light-year of lead with no scattering events. That leaves warm dark matter (with velocities from 1 to 10% of c) and cold dark matter (with velocities below 1% of c) to be discovered. The negatinos and positinos of supersymmetry theory were promising in this direction, but apparently have been falsified. But no one is "afraid".