Experimental Prospects
All of the above makes a very suggestive case for
SUSY. It is also very exciting because the mass range that is predicted is just what the new generation of particle accelerators is beginning to explore.
Regrettably, the American
superconducting supercollider project
(SSC) was cancelled, but a European
accelerator called the large hadron collider
(LHC) will begin operating
at a lab in Geneva, Switzerland (called CERN) around
2005. Its energy will
be about 8000 GeV per beam,
whereas the SSC energy would have been
20,000 GeV per beam.
In my opinion, The
LHC energy is high enough so that
if it does not find supersymmetry after a few years of operation,
we can safely conclude that it does not exist
in the vicinity of the electroweak scale.
If the
LHC (or another machine) does find SUSY,
on the other hand, this would be one of the most profound achievements in the
history of humankind. It would be more profound, in my opinion,
than the discovery of life on Mars, for example.
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