Re: Broken SUSY

Posted by DickT on July 03, 2002 at 13:33:28:

In Reply to: Broken SUSY posted by ronron on July 03, 2002 at 10:58:46:

Ron,

Pure SUSY matches every existing boson with a new fermion partner and every existing fermion with a new boson partner. If some of these partners happened not to exist, that would be "broken SUSY". Something keeps the superpartners from being observed. Either they just don't exist or they are very massive, so they can't be created out of present day accelerator energies.

Massive bosons are nothing new. The idea goes back to Yukawa in the 1930's, who showed that a massive boson would mediate a short range force. Since the force that holds the atomic nucleus is short range, the hunt was on for the "Yukawa boson".
First the muon was detected in cosmic rays and proposed as the desired particle. But the muon turned out to feel the weak force but not the strong, or nuclear force. Then the pion was detected, and filled the bill nicely. Old physics books will tell you how protons and neutrons exchange pions and turn into each other.
Nowadays the nuclear force is attributed to the gluons, and another mechanism entirely keeps the range of the force short. Gluons are massless.
But there are still massive bosons around: The three weak bosons W⁺, W^-, and Z⁰. They are thought to get their masses by interacting with the Higgs particle.

Regards,
Dick


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