CERN has a plan to achieve a historic milestone: finding supersymmetric dark matter

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During the last few weeks CERN has been unusually active. And there is no doubt that for all of us who closely follow his experiments it is great news. Just a week ago we told you about his strategy to go beyond the solid walls of the standard model in the search for the long-awaited new physics . Its most powerful tool in this area will be the High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC), which will presumably be ready by the end of this decade.

In any case, the real protagonist this time is the ATLAS experiment. Of course, the LHC, CERN’s largest particle accelerator, is an essential ingredient in most of the projects carried out by this organization, but when it comes to supersymmetry the ATLAS detector dares to dispute it . the prominence. After all, he has been responsible for collecting the data that is inviting physicists to look forward with optimism.

Supersymmetry is a theoretical model of particle physics that proposes the existence of a hypothetical particle that is paired with each of the fundamental particles we know. It seeks to explain the relationship between bosons, which have an integer spin, and fermions, which have a half-integer spin. However, it is important that we do not overlook that it is, as I mentioned a few lines above, a hypothetical theoretical framework that, therefore, has not yet been observed in nature. Not even experimentally.

Supersymmetry aspires to go hand in hand with dark matter and the hierarchy problem

Before moving forward, it is worth stopping for a moment to explain in the most intuitive way possible what spin is. This is an intrinsic property of elementary particles , just like the electric charge, derived from their angular rotation moment. The first experimental evidence supporting its existence came in 1922 thanks to the experiments of German physicists Otto Stern and Walther Gerlach, although scientists did not begin to understand the nature of this very important property of elementary particles until a few years later.

The reason it is not easy to understand precisely what spin is is because it is a quantum phenomenon , so it is not entirely correct to describe it as conventional rotational motion in space. Even so, the description that I have proposed in the previous paragraph is usually used for didactic purposes because it helps us to intuit without too much effort what we are talking about . In any case, the quantum nature of this property tells us something important: measuring it is very difficult .

The aspirations of supersymmetry are very high. Physicists who foresee the validity of this model hope that it will be useful to understand the nature of dark matter , why the mass of the Higgs boson is extraordinarily low or what is the relationship that presumably links the fundamental forces present in the nature. These last two questions are included in a research area known as the hierarchy problem in which the results obtained experimentally are not aligned with the theoretical models.

Fortunately, the CERN physicists who are involved in the ATLAS experiment already have very promising results. They are currently using highly advanced filtering algorithms and machine learning procedures to analyze the proton collision data collected by this detector between 2015 and 2018.

They are confident in ATLAS’ ability to shed light on supersymmetric particles. I hope they are not wrong. Who knows, we may not have to wait much longer for particle physicists to confirm that they have solid evidence for the existence of supersymmetric particles in their hands. If this is the case, one of the main enigmas of current physics, the nature of dark matter, could be definitively resolved.

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