Saturday, April 2, 2005

Supersplit supersymmetry

This paper by eight phenomenologists

is well done. You have to read the abstract - or the paper - quite carefully to become sure that it is an April fool's day hoax. Alternatively, you must know that some of the 8 authors are known to dislike supersymmetry.

What do these guys do? They take the models of split supersymmetry and improve it a little bit so that all remaining superpartners are sent to the Planck scale. This solves about 15 different problems of SUSY breaking - such as the gaugino decay problem, the flavor changing neutral currents, and so on. :-) The resulting model may resemble a model by Glashow, Salam, Weinberg at low (sub-Planckian) energies, but their motivation was not quite correct, the present authors say.

I think that such form of criticism is healthy, and despite my belief that SUSY is beautiful, realistic, and worth considering, I sympathize with many points of their paper. Let's hope that Nima and Savas won't be too upset. ;-) Let's also emphasize that the supersplit supersymmetry fails to reproduce some successes of split (and other) supersymmetry - at least one of them, namely the gauge coupling unification.