Tests and Implications of Increasing Evidence for Superpartners

Abstract

Although no individual piece of experimental evidence for supersymmetry is compelling so far, several are about as good as they can be with present errors. Most important, all pieces of evidence imply the same values for common parameters --- a necessary condition, and one unlikely to hold if the hints from data are misleading. The parameters are sparticle or soft-breaking masses and $ tan β.$ For the parameter ranges reported here, there are so far no signals that should have occurred but did not. Given those parameters a number of predictions can test whether the evidence is real. It turns out that the predictions are mostly different from the conventional supersymmetry ones, and might have been difficult to recognize as signals of superpartners. They are testable at LEP2, where neutralinos and charginos will appear mainly as $γγ+$ large $\slashchar{E}$ events, $γ+$ very large $\slashchar{E}$ events, and very soft lepton pairs of same or mixed flavor. The results demonstrate that we understand a lot about how to extract an effective SUSY Lagrangian from limited data, and that we can reasonably hope to learn about the theory near the Planck scale from the data at the electroweak scale.