3 ms·
Supersymmetry has not been found; however the top quark is an encouraging precedent. The top quark was predicted in the early 70s, and was expected to be found
by millstone 8y ago
Supersymmetry has not been found; however the top quark is an encouraging precedent.
The top quark was predicted in the early 70s, and was expected to be found soon. However colliders failed to find them, and its minimum mass kept getting pushed up. It wasn't found until 1995, at a much higher energy than was initially expected.
- cosmojg 8y agoHow did they account for the additional, unpredicted energy?
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoAIUI ... The presence of Top was predicted with the finding of Bottom, in order to maintain symmetry. It was expected to have a higher energy otherwise it would have been found ... but the energy turned out to be much higher. It wasn't that it was predicted to be low energy and was found to have a higher energy, it was that we knew it had higher energy than Bottom, but just not how high - like climbing a convex hill covered in cloud, one can't see the top, and one isn't sure until you reach it how high it's going. It's my understanding that the unpredictably high energy hasn't properly been accounted for but is believed to relate to Yukawa couplings. The energy was predicted within certain lower+upper bounds in '94 just prior to the confirmation of the Top in '95, and a Nobel was awarded for that work [relating to T parameters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peskin%E2%80%93Takeuchi_parameter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peskin%E2%80%93Takeuchi_parame...) which I don't claim to understand! 't Hooft and someone, erm, ...]. In part I believe it relates to how the Higgs works and whether the Higgs is composite - possibly being comprised of Top and Anti-Top in one theory.