LHC OLYMPICS

Exciting times ahead: at CERN the first LHC Olympics will take place!
It's sort of a contest between the leading particle physicists, to figure out what the right extension of the standard model is. It starts out from fake data that anticipate the real data that the LHC will generate within two years of time.

It will also be a contest between the various possible models. Which model it will turn out to be, may in a sense be more exciting to know than the physicist who figures it out. There are so many fascinating possibilities, like low energy supersymmetry, split supersymmetry, extra dimensions, little Higgs, black holes, and endless combinations thereof, apart from specifics pertaining to the concrete type of model (such as gauge groups, ghost fields, etc).

Since the data will be prepared by Gordy Kane, we can safely exclude the possibility that the solution will just be "Nothing exciting beyond the Standard Model". This leaves essentially two classes of solutions: one of Gordy's favorite models, or one of Savas' favorite models. One may think that since Gordy will prepare the data, it would be one of his models - but that would be too cheap, isn't it. This would have been the easier solution, because Gordy has constructed by far not as many alternative models as Savas. In fact, as pointed out in Motl's blog, Savas has insightfully pretty much covered up most of the space of possibilities - he almost can't fail this way. So given this enormous statistical weight factor, it is almost guaranteed that the winning model must be one of his models - congratulations!


Needless (I guess ?) to add that this nicely makes contact to the "Landscape" of string vacua. My conjecture is that quotienting out the stringy landscape by all the non-observable quantities, will just produce more or less Savas' set of theories - "more or less" meaning that there is a small remainder that will correspond to Gordy's models (and perhaps a few other models from outsiders, but those are expected to form a subset of measure zero so they are not statistically significant).

And we can even further cut down on the number of possibilities, by making use of a kind of anthropic reasoning! As we learned recently, almost all analysis software that exists is based on the MSSM or simple extensions of it; ie., it does not capture models without low energy supersymmetry. This let us safely exclude split supersymmetry as the right model, and even more so models without any supersymmetry - see how far we can get by simple arguments ?

So, indeed exciting times ahead - while the inventor of the winning model can be pre-determined by a statistical landscape-type analysis, as explained above, we can't wait to hear what precise low-energy susy model it will be! I figure this will take some time, though, hopefully someone will blog about any progress as it happens and keep us informed.