No one was too interested in the Higgs $500 bet I won – and was paid yesterday – but I have a more interesting outstanding bet against Adam Falkowski in which I would win $10,000 if supersymmetry is found.
Of course, the actual value of supersymmetry as a clever idea indisputably working somewhere in the foundations of Nature is higher by orders of magnitude.
However, I would only lose $100 if it is not found. You must be a true fundamentalist if you bet 100-to-1 in a bet about top-down particle physics, moreover against a person who knows 100+ times more about these issues than you do – and yes, I mean against your humble correspondent.
Physics Central has brought the readers' attention to the strongest evidence yet that indicates that I may very well win the bet:
First the Higgs, Next Supersymmetry?It is about a preprint that will become visible on Sunday night. I will only read it on Mondary morning, European time.
Dan Hooper and Matthew Buckley, two powerful enough particle physicists at the Fermilab, have looked at the deviations of the observed Higgs decays from the predictions of the Standard Model.
What is the vertict of their paper called "Are There Hints of Light Stops in Recent Higgs Search Results?" [link added on Monday morning]
The most obvious candidates are partners of the top partner, such as stops within the context of supersymmetry. We find that the presence of such a particle can easily modify the Standard Model Higgs widths in such a way to come within approximately one standard deviation of the observed values.This blog has been talking about the LHC stop squark rumors since February 2012 and this excitement hasn't gone away.
A fascinating detail of the coming Buckley-Hooper paper is that the best fit is obtained if the stop squark mass is near \(300\GeV\). This just happens to be the same mass I mentioned just two days ago in a blog entry on the CMS top partner conspiracies. Recall that they greyed out this region of their chart where a signal was pretty clearly present, invented an excuse, and argued that a more than 3-sigma excess means "no excess".
In this CMS search for bosonic top partners (which mostly means stop squarks), an exclusion curve was expected (thick red plus minus thin red errors) but no exclusion could have been deduced from the observations. Moreover, points such as \(m_{\rm stop}=300\GeV\) and \(m_{\rm LSP}=140\GeV\) have been "grayed out" with a strange excuse: allegedly unpredictable initial state radiation. If you click at the link, the #1 hit just happens to go to the website of a person who is both a member of the CMS statistical committee as well as a fanatical anti-supersymmetric fundamentalist.
According to the prevailing logic in supersymmetry, a light stop squark is essential for the light \(126\GeV\) Higgs to remain natural. The possibility that a \(300\GeV\) stop squark is beginning to emerge in front of our eyes strikingly contrasts with the preposterous claims by some people that the LHC has excluded any superpartners up to \(1\TeV\). Be sure, it hasn't. Some SUSY models look more viable than others but none of the important classes has been quite excluded yet.
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