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Scientists To Hunt For Supersymmetric Particle In LHC
An anonymous reader notes this article about the upcoming restart of the LHC. "A senior researcher at the Large Hadron Collider says a new particle could be detected this year that is even more exciting than the Higgs boson. The accelerator is due to come back online in March after an upgrade that has given it a big boost in energy. This could force the first so-called supersymmetric particle to appear in the machine, with the most likely candidate being the gluino. Its detection would give scientists direct pointers to "dark matter". And that would be a big opening into some of the remaining mysteries of the universe. 'It could be as early as this year. Summer may be a bit hard but late summer maybe, if we're really lucky,' said Prof Beate Heinemann, who is a spokeswoman for the Atlas experiment, one of the big particle detectors at the LHC. 'We hope that we're just now at this threshold that we're finding another world, like antimatter for instance. We found antimatter in the beginning of the last century. Maybe we'll find now supersymmetric matter.'"
A 126 GeV Higgs boson as we (also CMS did, btw) have observed it, and studied its properties in detail, is no problem to be accomodated in even the minimal versions of supersymmetry. What makes you say it was not expected at that mass? It's on the high side, but the higher the mass, the more that Higgs boson with or without supersymmetry would look the same in our detectors...