Reuters News 10 Aug 2012

Scientists who stunned the world with their discovery of a particle that may be the basic building block of the universe now are on the lookout for a hitherto unseen world of particles that could open the way to finalising a 'theory of everything.' CERN scientists, who announced last month that - almost certainly - the elusive Higgs boson had been spotted, are trawling through the vast volume of material produced in the Geneva research centre's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for signs of what they call 'SUSY'. Formally known as Supersymmetry, SUSY is the idea that every one of the elementary particles that make up the universe and everything in it has an almost, but not quite identical, 'superpartner'. 'SUSY is still a very valid option and we have just started to constrain it on the energy scale,' CERN particle physicist Oliver Buchmueller [Physics] told Reuters. Its existence, many researchers say, was supported by the presumed discovery of the Higgs with which, physicists say, it is inextricably linked... The fact that this has not proven to be the case has led to speculation in parts of the scientific media and blogosphere, as well as among some older researchers, that SUSY-hunting is taking particle physics up a blind alley. 'Is Supersymmetry dead?' asked a headline in the respected journal Scientific American in April this year... 'There is no scientific basis for that claim,' [said Buchmueller], who shares time between Geneva and teaching at Imperial College London. 'The theory is still very much alive.'

www.msnbc.msn.com/id/48576087/ns/technology_and_science-science/