## Monday, November 08, 2021 ... //

### Natural supersymmetry pretty much predicts a $$125\GeV$$ Higgs

At least with some extra assumptions about the incorporation to the string landscape

A very small blog post, mostly a linker-not-thinker one because others simply do not pass the cost-and-benefit analysis any longer.

First, I was sent an excerpt from a strange article, John Wheeler’s Desert Island: The conservatism of non-empirical physics, by Alexander Blum, a social scientist, because it mentioned me. The quote with my name is...

I can think of one crass example, which I would, however, be hesitant to generalize given the size of the string community: the string theorist Luboš Motl and his blog, tellingly entitled “The reference frame: supersymmetric world from a conservative viewpoint”...
You may find the whole paper somewhere but sorry, I am not interested in a copy.

Too bad, "non-empirical physics" is an oxymoron. If it ain't empirical, it is not physics. Physicists are leading empiricists and it is particularly the case of string theorists. It was obviously also the case of the fellow conservative John Archibald Wheeler who co-invented not only the heavily theoretical concepts such as the WdW equation, Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory, the term "black hole" (and "superspace", "wormhole", "it from bit")... but also the Breit-Wheeler process, S-matrix, and indeed, he co-built the first nuclear reactors! ;-)

Only brain-dead people believe the ludicrous propaganda that string theory and/or physicists of Wheeler's type are "non-empirical". While I don't know whether the article ends up saying that conservatives and/or Wheeler and/or your humble correspondent and/or string theorists as a group are good or bad, I have seen enough not to be interested in the rest.

Second. The supersymmetric particles or superpartners haven't been observed but the arguments are unchanged that imply that our world almost certainly possesses supersymmetry that gets unbroken at a higher energy scale. A new hep-th paper
Comparison of SUSY spectra generators for natural SUSY and string landscape predictions
They define their refined paradigm of "radiatively natural supersymmetry" which depends on the string theory landscape. Various pocket universes contain string vacua, those with very high weak scales are eliminated, and the rest is statistically counted. Aside from the natural and stabilized weak scale around $$100\GeV$$, they conclude that the Higgs mass near $$125\GeV$$ is statistically favored, there is a peak. It was known to be true with Isasugra, a supersymmetric spectrum generator, and they show that $$125$$-$$127\GeV$$ is also favored for the light Higgs boson mass if you use the generators SOFTSUSY, SPHENO and SUSPECT (SSS). The physicists would have been more impressive if they had predicted the mass before the Higgs was discovered but at the end, the most important thing about physics is not egos' pissing contests. What matters are valid theories and correct propositions, whether they were found after the experiment or before it.
The superpartner masses are predicted to remain above the energies accessible by the LHC. Table 1 shows the electroweakinos between $$0.1$$-$$1\TeV$$ and most of the superpartners between $$2$$-$$5\TeV$$. The detailed masses are a bit random and the general statement, that the masses are roughly of this order, may have been put in in some way. I think that the choice of assumptions and adjustable parameters isn't quite under control so many of the patterns could be circular reasoning. But sorry if it ain't the case. I do believe that reasonable enough assumptions – which are partially defined, with some fuzzy boundaries – do imply the Higgs boson roughly of the right mass, as a likely prediction in the statistical sense.