David Kaplan on SUSY, in general

David had a busy week at CERN. Besides making a documentary thriller about the LHC and peforming at the theory seminar, he also gave a series of four lectures entitled Introduction to Supersymmetry. Somehow unexpectedly, behind this title hides a pretty basic introduction to supersymmetry. A particle theorist working beyond the standard model would not learn anything new from these lectures. For the remaining part of the population they offer a nice account of the current theoretical and experimental status of supersymmetry. David finds, i believe, a good balance between enthusiasm and skepticism.

The first lecture contains a review of the standard model and motivations for going beyond. The second is about constructing susy lagrangians, the one of the MSSM in particular. By the end of this lecture most of the experimentalists have vanished from the audience and David could move to more advanced subjects. The remaining two lectures introduce various models of supersymmetry breaking. A lot of time is devoted to discussing possible experimental signals, with more than usual emphasis on non-standard scenarios. The last lecture, in fact, has quite an overlap with the theory seminar.

The video recordings and the transparencies can be found here.

PS. I can't find a photo on the internet, except the one i already used in the previous post. Does anybody have a funny photo of David, e.g. standing on his head or parachute jumping?