Colloquium
Physics Lecture Hall
Wednesday, September 10, 2014, 4:45 pm
Tea and cookies @ 4:30 pm
David Shih
(Rutgers):
Supersymmetry and the LHC
The LHC discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 was a stunning success for
the Standard Model of particle physics. However, at the same time, the
discovery of the Higgs also reinforced the urgency of the "hierarchy
problem" -- how did the Higgs (and the rest of the Standard Model) end
up so much lighter than the Planck scale? In this talk, I will give a
non-technical overview of supersymmetry, one of the most popular and
promising solutions to the hierarchy problem. I will describe the basic
framework of supersymmetry, its major successes and predictions, and the
current status of searches for it at the LHC.