The Status of Supersymmetry

Up to now, supersymmetry has been a theorist’s dream and an experimentalist’s nightmare. On the one hand, theorists tend to like supersymmetry because it provides a beautiful mathematical structure which can be used to stabilize the mass hierarchy against radiative corrections. On the other hand, many experimentalists despise the subject because supersymmetric predictions always seem to lie just out of reach. At present, direct searches for supersymmetry are just shots in the dark because current accelerators do not have the power to explore significant regions of the parameter space. As we will see, this will soon change, but for now, direct searches do not restrict the theory in any important way. Precision electroweak measurements also reveal very little about supersymmetry. The technical reason for this is that supersymmetry decouples from all standard-model electroweak observables. For example, the supersymmetric and standard-model values of S and T are related as follows (1)