An interview with Arkani-Hamed on SUSY

Higgs news: The Daily Mail claims that CERN will only announce 4-sigma near-discoveries on Wednesday, short of the 5-sigma discovery claim. Of course, two single-detector 4-sigma claim imply a 6-sigma overall evidence for the God particle. Five God particle founding fathers were invited to the seminar so you may better buy the "I \(\heartsuit\) Higgs" T-shirt now.

A reader nicknamed Synchronize has brought my attention to this almost excellent Science Watch interview with Nima Arkani-Hamed.

Nima Arkani-Hamed on maximally supersymmetric theories

They start by explaining that Nima is a big shot who doesn't belong to the bottom 99%. He says that SUSY is so fundamental that everyone works on that in one way or another. Then he criticizes string theorists for having been insufficiently stringy some years ago – for spending too little time with the most marvelous and supersymmetric vacua such as one described by the maximally supersymmetric gauge theory relatively to the more complex and less supersymmetric compactifications.



In a rather technocratic method – which is surely superior in comparison with the bullshit promotion of crackpot papers by the armchair physicists in the media – they ask Nima about his two most cited papers in the last decade (so that the large extra dimensions are excluded).




They're papers about deconstruction which just doesn't happen to be too closely related to SUSY although his paper with your humble correspondent and three others applies deconstruction to some stringy theories, including the (2,0) theory and little string theory, where SUSY plays a crucial role.

The interviewer couldn't quite see that the first top-cited papers are closely linked to one another, either, so the predecided structure of the interview didn't end up being quite as smooth as the interviewer may have expected.

Nima mentions some cool properties of the maximally supersymmetric theories, the harmonic oscillators of the 21st century, and says that he is not much more worried about SUSY at the LHC now than he was before the LHC was getting started – because some signs that SUSY wouldn't be behind the corner were already available (I am a witness to this claim, having listened to Nima's opinions about these matters for years). In a few years, we will have the final answer on whether or not the lightness of the Higgs boson is explained by a natural mechanism such as natural SUSY in the sense many of us believed. There won't be any more babbling about this issue, just some new cold hard facts...

At the end, Nima refers to some cool links between these physical theories and some very advanced mathematics that he's been obsessed with in recent years.