Three decades of theorising and calculating. Entire careers spent constructing ideas. Nine billion dollars invested in an underground ring that spans two nations. Ten thousand dedicated scientists and engineers looking for the particle physics equivalent of a needle in a haystack. It's all been leading to this moment. Small wonder that amid bated breath, you can hear a lot of nervous laughter.
"It's got to be there, damn it!" Nobel prizewinning physicist Frank Wilczek chuckles in his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. He's talking about supersymmetry, endearingly known as SUSY, a theory that most physicists believe will lead them beyond the standard model of particle physics, the tried-and-true model of how particles and forces interact, and one big step closer to understanding how reality works.
Physicists are doggedly searching for it in the debris of particle collisions from ATLAS and CMS, two experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland. A year into their runs, neither have glimpsed so much as a hint of SUSY particles at masses up to 700 gigaelectronvolts – well within the range theorists expect it to lurk (arxiv.org/abs/1103.1984, arxiv.org/abs/1102.2357, arxiv.org/abs/1102.5290, arxiv.org/abs/1101.1628).
Rumours are spreading of SUSY's demise, and alternative theories are already waiting in the wings (see box below). But for many physicists like Wilczek, SUSY is just too beautiful to be wrong. "It would be really cruel of nature to get us this far, and have the next step in sight, and then it's all just a joke on us."
To read the rest of the article, click here."Will they tell us the truth if they don't find it? No one could replicate it as there is only one LHC. They would have to let independent groups repeat the experiment on the same machine." -- Jack Sarfatti