New Page: Some Exotic Searches for Supersymmetry Etc.

After a few days of preparation, my colloquium on the Large Hadron Collider appears to be ready for presentation at Harvard today.  Typically in a colloquium one discusses some details of one’s own research, but there’s so much to say about the primary physics motivation behind the LHC (clarifying the nature of the Higgs field), the challenges of doing science at such a machine, and the flood of current results from the ATLAS and CMS experiments that I’ll be lucky if I manage to squeeze any of it in. Almost all of my LHC research these days involves trying to make sure that the experimental program is comprehensive and efficient, and isn’t missing anything.  So there’s not much point in trying to explain it to a broad audience of physicists without going through the details  of the LHC first… and doing that easily takes up the whole available hour.

Meanwhile, following up on this post from last week , I have put up a new webpage describing a very interesting class of searches at the Large Hadron Collider that are aimed at finding models which violate the first or second of the assumptions of classic supersymmetry, and produce a new very long-lived particle that is electrically charged and/or is affected by the strong nuclear force.   The methods used actually don’t depend on supersymmetry at all, and can find (or exclude) any similar long-lived particle from any new source.  (The new page accompanies a previous webpage describing a class of searches that are aimed at models that violate the second of the three assumptions of classic supersymmetry, and that therefore often produce photons or Z particles.  More pages of this type are on the way.)