SUSY requiem

From my Google reader of the day before yesterday, the AIP physicists working of supersymmetry are starting to be sure that supersymmetry ( SUSY ), in spite of its mathematical elegance, is wrong. By now with hundreds of trillions of collisions at the Large Hadron Collider--proton proton collisions and lead nuclei collisions--there should have been thousands of decays that showed the transient existence of supersymmetric particles. A sought after particle was the neutralino, the lowest energy member of the set of supersymmetric particles (squarks and selectrons are others) and a candidate for the particles of dark matter.
So far, no supersymmetric particles have been seen at all. So SUSY appears to be dead.

This leaves big problems in particle physics (not so much elsewhere where physicists and others assume that particles, atoms, and molecules are well behaved and do not spend much time wondering why).

In particle physics (please correct me when I am wrong and I will edit the post) the theoretical estimates of the Planck mass are wrong by 120 powers of ten, a serious discrepancy. SUSY was supposed to lessen this discrepancy by having particles from the Standard Model interact with supersymmetric particles and virtual particles as they moved about as modeled by Quantum Chromodynamics. If there are no supersymmetric particles, this method to get rid of the 10^120 is lost. Also, one of the candidates for dark matter does not seem to exist either.

This brings us to the Higgs, another necessary part of the Standard Model. I asked a colleague whether a particle such as a proton acquires mass by moving through a Higgs field or whether the Higgs field has to be populated with excitations (Higgs bosons) in order for the proton to have mass. She did not know so, with the help of Google and an AIP discussion group, I found a group of physicists talking about it. According to them, even if a Higgs boson exists, there are still lots of unresolved issues. First among them is the question of where a Higgs boson gets its own mass since it is not moving through a Higgs field to gain this mass. Second is the problem of the proton's mass. According to standard relativistic quantum mechanics, most of the proton's mass comes from the motions of the quarks that make up the proton. There is little left for the Higgs field to do. The puzzle of mass seems to extend far beyond the Higgs boson.

Which brings us to Lisa Randall, a theoretical physicist and clear writer. She said, in her book "Warped Passages", that for theorists one of the best results that could come from the Large Hadron Collider would be no new particles at all (Xb(3P) was predicted with the Standard Model but never seen and has been spotted). If there were no new particles, then there was something really inadequate about the Standard Model and theorists would have a lot of work to do. Apparently, they have a lot of work to do not only in new theories but also in proposing experimental tests of these new theories.