Applications of Supersymmetry (5p or more)

NOTE: As of February 13, the course information is now maintained on the following

SUSY Course Wiki

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The information below is only kept as a reference for now and will not be updated any more. Please go to the wiki instead.

This page contains information about the graduate course Applications of Supersymmetry held in the spring semster of 2008.

Introduction

One of the most interesting hypotheses about physics beyond the Standard Model, supersymmetry, will be seriously tested during the next few years. At CERN's Large Hadron Collider, the new particles predicted by supersymmetry will be searched for. The lightest supersymmetric particle is also one of of the prime candidates for dark matter, and new spaceborne detectors like PAMELA and GLAST will soon give improved limits, or detect, antimatter and gamma-rays produced in dark matter annihilations in the halo. Also, the IceCube experiment will search for a neutrino signal from annihilations in the Earth or Sun. In of all these searches for supersymmetric matter, researchers at AlbaNova play a prominent role.

This graduate course will prepare the participants for this interesting epoch of contemporary physics. It will focus on the phenomenological aspects of supersymmetric models, will contain basic properties of supersymmetric lagrangians, including properties of Majorana fermions, methods of supersymmetry breaking, Feynman rules and building the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM). The idea will be to make at least some simple calulations of cross sections and decay rates in the MSSM; also basic use of the DarkSUSY package for computing rates of dark matter detection will be introduced.

Schedule

Start: Thursday January 10, 10:15 - 12:00, group room CoPS A5:1041

Schedule: Weekly, Thursdays 10.15-12 in A5:1041 until January 31. From February 6 and onwards, the lectures are on Wednesdays 9.15-11. The lectures will continue until we are finished (end of April/May).

Course plan: See below

Lecturers: Lars Bergström and Joakim Edsjö

Literature: We have found no book which covers exactly the intended contents of the course. The main book will be I. Aitchison "Supersymmetry in Particle Physics", Cambridge University Press, 2007, but the lecture notes "A Supersymmetry Primer" by S.P. Martin (hep-ph/9709356) will also be useful. For a more complete text, see e.g. "Weak Scale Supersymmetry: From Superfields to Scattering Events", by H. Baer and X. Tata, Cambride University Press, 2006.

Prerequisites: Quantum field theory, e.g., corresponding the the book by Mandl and Shaw.

Examination: Home exercises and active participation in the course.

Lecture notes and course plan

Here we will try to collect scanned lecture notes (in case they are readable). If some is missing and you have good notes yourself, please send them to Joakim and he will put them up here. Note that this plan is a tentative guideline and will most likely change somewhat as we move along.

Home exercises

Here are the home excercises required for passing the course. We will add more here as the course goes on (roughly one set every second week).

This page was last upated on 13 February, 2008 .