Quote:
Originally Posted by Shiraz
...getting back to the science, if the SM is sufficient and supersymmetry is not part of reality, does that rule out a main contender for "dark stuff" ?
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A conundrum facing Science is that one cannot prove a negative.
The adage "the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence" applies here.
The experiment itself could be the issue not the theory itself.
While the LHC is now operating at a centre of mass energy of around 13 TeV, well above the theoretical mass limits of the lighter supersymmetric particles, finding these particles may require the acquisition of much more data as was the case for the Higgs boson.
Unless a theory comes along that explicitly rules out the existence of supersymmetry we cannot be sure if the theory or experiment is the culprit.
Hence we can't rule out supersymmetry at this stage, either as a theory or as a dark matter candidate although it may shift the emphasis to alternative candidates.
An example of a theory which explains a null result is the absence of free quarks in particle accelerator experiments.
This non observance was finally explained by
quark confinement in hadrons in quantum chromodynamics theory.
Regards
Steven