Supersymmetry and the MSSM: An Elementary Introduction

TL;DR

This paper provides an accessible, self-contained introduction to supersymmetry and the MSSM, aimed at graduate students, emphasizing practical understanding over formal derivations and covering key phenomenological aspects.

Contribution

It offers a straightforward, constructive approach to SUSY and MSSM, suitable for students with basic quantum mechanics and field theory background, with minimal reliance on complex notation.

Findings

Introduction to SUSY with practical construction of MSSM

Coverage of gauge unification and Higgs mass bounds

Accessible to students for further phenomenological study

Abstract

These notes are an expanded version of a short course of lectures given for graduate students in particle physics at Oxford. The level was intended to be appropriate for students in both experimental and theoretical particle physics.The purpose is to present an elementary and self-contained introduction to SUSY that follows on, relatively straightforwardly, from graduate-level courses in relativistic quantum mechanics and introductory quantum field theory. The notation adopted, at least initially, is one widely used in RQM courses, rather than the `spinor calculus' (dotted and undotted indices) notation found in most SUSY sources, though the latter is introduced in optional Asides. There is also a strong preference for a `do-it-yourself' constructive approach, rather than for a top-down formal deductive treatment. The main goal is to provide a practical understanding of how the softly broken MSSM is constructed. Relatively less space is devoted to phenomenology, though simple `classic' results are covered, including gauge unification, the bound on the mass of the lightest Higgs boson, and sparticle mixing. By the end of the course students (readers) should be provided with access to the contemporary phenomenological literature.