It’s been a little while since this was put out into the public domain and given the minor hoopla about the few events above background the CDF are showing I thought I’d post this rather nice recent publication from ATLAS. The analysis entitled “Search for Supersymmetry Using Final States with One Lepton, Jets, and Missing Transverse Momentum with the ATLAS Detector in √s=7 TeV pp Collisions” was published in Phys. Rev. Lett. (106, 131802 (2011)) on March 28, 2011. Although the title may lack a certain verve and snap, the Letter was deemed interesting and perhaps even important enough to spawn a viewpoint entry from the PRL editors. You can access the publication from that same link. But the again what if Supersymmetry is wrong? We can never really rule it out, to paraphrase a much more famous physicist than I, SUSY can only be discovered, or abandoned. Depends how patient we’re willing to be I suppose.
The analysis shows no excess above expectation for events consistent with Supersymmetry, but it does, along with several recent analyses from both ATLAS and CMS, demonstrate the relative maturity of new physics searches at the LHC. This will only grow in the coming months as the dash to analyze the 2011 data reaches fever pitch before a suite of what promise to be fascinating conferences this summer. With many CDF/D0 analyses heading towards their final iterations and more statistics to try to underline or refute the existence of the excess seen by CDF covered in the New York Times article and given a detailed report on the US LHC blogs.
I’ll mention more about a selection of the various ATLAS and CMS new physics searches in another post I imagine, but as of yet we are yet to see any striking evidence of the failure of the Standard Model to describe the data collected at the LHC. Maybe this will be the year?