LHC results: Not just the same old thing

At the International Conference on High Energy Physics someone said something about Supersymmetry. These guys are talking way over my head. But it sounds very exciting and I want to understand. Is there someone who can dumb it down just a little for me? I guess what I want to know is this, does this support the theory of Supersymmettry? Super Gravity? M-Theory?  Does it undermine the standard model? Does it mean anything? Where are Brian Cox, Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Michio Kaku when I need them.

Heavy Long-lived Particles at the LHC

“It’s reassuring that from day one the LHC plunges into out-of-the-box searches that some call exotic. My hunch is that, if there’s any new physics at the TeV scale at all, it will take some unexpected form that will require non-standard techniques to discover. And the added value is that in these less explored corners of particle phenomenology interesting results and non-trivial limits can be obtained relatively fast, even during the first year of the LHC running.”

via Blogging ICHEP 2010: Heavy Long-lived Particles at the LHC.

“The CMS experiment presented results from their program to search for another type of exotic particle—stopped gluinos. These particles, if created in LHC collisions, would stop in the CMS detector, live a relatively long time compared to the infinitesimal lifetimes of particle like a top quark, and then decay into other particles. CMS physicists hunt these particles by collecting data between collisions of bunches of protons in the LHC beam. The DZero experiment has previously searched for the particles, and determined that they could not exist with a lifetime longer than 30 microseconds. With only a few months’ worth of data, CMS has now excluded the existence of these particles with a lifetime between 75 nanoseconds and 6 microseconds.”

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