A NEW STATE OF MATTER! Scientists Just Found Evidence for a New Type of Matter in the Universe! (It’s Called Supersymmetry and It’s Amazing!)

The search for supersymmetry, a theoretical framework that could revolutionize our understanding of the universe, has been a long and exciting journey. Supersymmetry predicts the existence of a new class of particles, called "superpartners," that could explain the mysteries of the universe, such as the nature of dark matter and the unification of fundamental forces.

Source: Ars Technica

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator, has been at the forefront of the search for supersymmetry. Since its inception in 2008, the LHC has been smashing protons together at energies never before achieved in a laboratory, producing a flood of data that scientists have been tirelessly analyzing in search of new physics.

Despite many years of searching, no direct evidence for supersymmetry has been found so far. However, the LHC experiments have set stringent limits on the masses of superpartners, excluding many possible scenarios for supersymmetry. For example, the LHC has excluded the existence of gluinos, the superpartners of gluons, with masses below about 2 TeV (teraelectronvolts), and the existence of squarks, the superpartners of quarks, with masses below about 1.5 TeV.

The search for supersymmetry is far from over. The LHC is currently in its second run, after a major upgrade that increased its energy to 13 TeV, and is expected to collect much more data in the coming years. The search for supersymmetry has also expanded beyond the LHC, with experiments such as the Dark Energy Survey, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, and the IceCube Neutrino Observatory searching for indirect evidence of superpartners.

The discovery of supersymmetric particles would have significant implications for our understanding of the universe. Supersymmetry could explain the nature of dark matter, a mysterious substance that makes up about 27% of the universe, and unify the fundamental forces of nature, including gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. Supersymmetry could also shed light on the hierarchy problem, the puzzle of why the Higgs boson has a much lower mass than the Planck scale, the scale at which quantum mechanics and gravity are expected to become unified.

However, the absence of supersymmetric particles would also be an important discovery, as it would challenge the current theoretical framework and indicate that there may be other explanations for the puzzles of the universe. It would also provide constraints on the nature of dark matter and the unification of forces.

In conclusion, the search for supersymmetry is a fascinating area of research that has the potential to transform our understanding of the universe. While the quest for new physics is a challenging one, the exciting discoveries and findings so far demonstrate that the journey is well worth the effort.