LHC Breaks Supersymmetry’s Beauty

LHC Breaks Supersymmetry’s Beauty

Supersymmetry’s elegant mathematical structure was intended to replace the “standard model,” the eminently serviceable but sometimes creaky and in parts aesthetically unpleasing theoretical construct that is currently our best description of matter’s fundamental workings. Supersymmetry’s beauty is now meeting some ugly facts emerging from the Large Hadron Collider, the gargantuan particle accelerator situated at CERN near Geneva. Supersymmetry predicts a whole slew of new particles, and by most reckonings the LHC should have started producing some of them already. But it hasn’t. That throws up some big questions. Is supersymmetry really the right answer? If not, what is?