Supersymmetry for Alp Hikers

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive phenomenological overview of supersymmetry, focusing on the MSSM, its motivations, theoretical foundations, breaking mechanisms, and experimental prospects for detection.

Contribution

It offers a structured, lecture-based introduction to supersymmetry, emphasizing model-building, breaking, and experimental constraints in the MSSM framework.

Findings

Supersymmetry may appear at the TeV scale due to naturalness and gauge unification.

The structure of sparticle mass matrices and mixing is reviewed.

Experimental and cosmological constraints on MSSM are discussed.

Abstract

These lectures provide a phenomenological introduction to supersymmetry, concentrating on the minimal supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model (MSSM). In the first lecture, motivations are provided for thinking that supersymmetry might appear at the TeV scale, including the naturalness of the mass hierarchy, gauge unification and the probable mass of the Higgs boson. In the second lecture, simple globally supersymmetric field theories are introduced, with the emphasis on features important for model-building. Supersymmetry breaking and local supersymmetry (supergravity) are introduced in the third lecture, and the structure of sparticle mass matrices and mixing are reviewed. Finally, the available experimental and cosmological constraints on MSSM parameters are discussed and combined in the fourth lecture, and the prospects for discovering supersymmetry in future experiments are previewed.