Some physicists feared the worst when tentative sightings of the Higgs boson were reported at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in July by a blip in proton–proton collision data. Their fear was not that the notorious boson – the last missing piece of the Standard Model of particle physics – might be about to be discovered. What concerned them was that the Higgs’ mass lying in the region of 140 GeV, as inferred from the small bump, spelt gloom for an idea that has dominated the search for physics beyond the Standard Model: supersymmetry (SUSY).
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