Saturday 17 February 2007

David Kaplan on SUSY, in general

David had a busy week at CERN. Besides making a documentary thriller about the LHC and peforming at the theory seminar, he also gave a series of four lectures entitled Introduction to Supersymmetry. Somehow unexpectedly, behind this title hides a pretty basic introduction to supersymmetry. A particle theorist working beyond the standard model would not learn anything new from these lectures. For the remaining part of the population they offer a nice account of the current theoretical and experimental status of supersymmetry. David finds, i believe, a good balance between enthusiasm and skepticism.

The first lecture contains a review of the standard model and motivations for going beyond. The second is about constructing susy lagrangians, the one of the MSSM in particular. By the end of this lecture most of the experimentalists have vanished from the audience and David could move to more advanced subjects. The remaining two lectures introduce various models of supersymmetry breaking. A lot of time is devoted to discussing possible experimental signals, with more than usual emphasis on non-standard scenarios. The last lecture, in fact, has quite an overlap with the theory seminar.

The video recordings and the transparencies can be found here.

PS. I can't find a photo on the internet, except the one i already used in the previous post. Does anybody have a funny photo of David, e.g. standing on his head or parachute jumping?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm watching the lecture videos now and at least to the available resolution, Kaplan looks remarkably like... me, just with darker hair! Unfortunately, I have no funny picture of myself standing on my head or parachute jumping to colorize. That would be fun.

Luboš Motl said...

Thanks for these interesting links and comments. I finally added you to my blogroll because this blog is among the very best expert blogs.

Anonymous said...

Hi Jester,

the Hbb coupling precision obtainable by LHC experiments with 30/fb is about 40%. This is the short answer to a question you made on my blog... If you need the long answer, I posted about it today.

Cheers!

Ps congratulations for getting in Lumo's blogroll... ;-)