Supersymmetry: Aspirations and Prospects

The realization in the early 1980s that weak scale supersymmetry stabilizes the Higgs sector of the spectacularly successful Standard Model led several authors to explore whether low energy supersymmetry could play a role in particle physics. Among these were Richard Arnowitt, Ali Chamseddine and Pran Nath who constructed a viable {\em locally} supersymmetric Grand Unified Theory (GUT), laying down the foundation for supergravity GUT models of particle physics. Supergravity models continue to be explored as one of the most promising extensions of the Standard Model. After a quick overview of some of the issues and aspirations of early researchers working to bring supersymmetry into the mainstream of particle physics, we re-examine early arguments that seemed to imply that superpartners would be revealed in experiments at LEP2 or at the Tevatron. Our purpose is to assess whether the absence of any superpartners in searches at LHC8 presents a crisis for supersymmetry. Toward this end, we re-evaluate fine-tuning arguments that lead to upper bounds on (some) superpartner masses. We conclude that phenomenologically viable superpartner spectra that could arise within a high scale model tuned no worse than a few percent are perfectly possible. While no viable underlying model of particle physics that leads to such spectra has yet emerged, we show that the (supergravity-based) Radiatively-driven Natural Supersymmetry (RNS) framework serves as a surrogate for a phenomenological analysis of an underlying theory with modest fine-tuning. We outline the phenomenological implications of this framework, with emphasis on those LHC and electron-positron collider signatures that might point to the underlying natural origin of gauge and Higgs boson masses. We conclude that the supergravity GUT paradigm laid down in 1982 by Arnowitt, Chamseddine and Nath, and others, remains a vibrant possibility.