RPP 2020

Yesterday I finished the teaching in my SUSY course for this academic year. I talked (among many other things) about going beyond the MSSM (the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model) and modern perspectives on the future of SUSY phenomenology. To add a little from the post a couple of weeks ago, I presented three approaches that have been embraced by the community for a few years now:

1. Carry on looking for the MSSM. As I said before, the LHC has done a good job of limiting the superpartners that are coupled to the strong force, but in reality a rather poor job for electroweak-charged states. There is also a good argument that the Higgs mass alone suggests we may never see the coloured particles without a new collider anyway, but this is not watertight.
2. Look at non-minimal supersymmetric models. This is the approach I have favoured in my own work (in particular Dirac gaugino models).
3. Abandon a complete SUSY theory at low energies, and look instead at high-scale SUSY or split SUSY. In particular, the latter allows you to keep gauge coupling unification and a natural dark matter candidate. On the other hand, it seems hard to find in string theory, because of the need for an approximate R-symmetry.

In my earlier post, I stated that I would not recommend that new students exclusively study SUSY, and indeed I do not propose SUSY phenomenology as the main focus of my new students. This is at least partly a sociological statement: they would struggle to find a career in the current climate, and I strongly believe that it is important to know at least something about SUSY. But it is even more vital to learn about all of the problems of the Standard Model and the many potential solutions, and look for the most promising ways to make progress based on current and future experiments in an open-minded way.

Rencontres de Physique des Particules 2020

I'm currently at the first day of the annual French particle theory meeting. There will be some nice political discussions alongside interesting talks that represent a little of the field. Notably, in physics Beyond the Standard Model there have been talks today about indirect dark matter searches, axions and the tension in the Hubble constant, by people recruited in recent years to the CNRS; there will be more talks tomorrow and Friday by recent recruits and people hoping to be recruited (this meeting often serving as a shop window).

France has a unique way of funding research, in that the CNRS hires people to work solely on research, and supports them in "mixed labs" where there are also university professors and "maîtres de conferences" who are the equivalent of assistant or associate professors elsewhere. Unlike their university counterparts, CNRS researchers do not have to teach, and have a huge amount of liberty. For this last reason I absolutely love my job. The French system also believes in recruiting people relatively early in their careers but requires good judgement in finding the stars of tomorrow rather than people who are already established. So at this meeting you could say there is sampling of what the CNRS committee may believe (or what some people hope they believe) is the future of the field ...

Another feature of the French system is, perhaps paradoxically in the land of "liberté, egalité, fraternité," that it is ultra-elitist. The "grandes écoles" (in particular Ecole Normale and Ecole Polytechnique) are incredibly selective institutions for students, but most people outside of France have not heard of them because they barely register on the Shanghai rankings -- but only because they are small (they punch incredibly hard for their weight, and top tables of "small universities). One interesting thing we heard today, from the Vice Provost for Research at Ecole Polytechnique, was that the government aims to make Ecole Polytechnique into a French version of MIT, which would mean doubling the number of students -- but multiplying the budget by a factor of ten (this is probably a slightly unfair calculation, as it would not include the salaries of CNRS researchers, for example). Apparently the way they are trying to achieve this is to "work out how to get money out of" large multinationals, essentially using the students' skills as a "goldmine." Sadly these companies are not at all interested in basic research, and so funding for future fundamental science would have to be somehow siphoned off from that obtained to do machine learning etc.

Ah, I've just veered into cynicism, which I want to avoid on this blog, so I better go and take part in the "table ronde" discussion and save real politics for a different post ...