New Particle Physics at the LHC and Its Connection to Dark Matter

"New Particle Physics at the LHC and Its Connection to Dark Matter" is the name of the current workshop at the Aspen Center for Physics running through Sep 9th.
I'm hanging out for the first few days and the first presentation is on "what has the LHC Higgs done to supersymmetry"?

So, basic point is that supersymmetry sort of predicts that the Higgs mass (125 GeV) should be close to the Z mass (91 GeV), up to some corrections. So the mass corrections can be parametrised in perturbative theory, and how do you nail a ~ 30% correction and keep everything natural?

We talk about our feelings.
We break things.
Spurious sparticles!
Seriously, the bottom line is that the perturbation theory is nasty because higher order terms are comparable to first order terms - surprise.
So need to put in high energy cutoff physics, and round and round we go.

So the essential problem is that we now know the electroweak interaction scale, and the Higgs mass.
It is aesthetically nice if we can keep supersymmetry, and it would be, but that messes things up.
Actually anything messes things up.

But, we would also like there to be some sign of new physics in a range where we can see it, something simple like a supersymmetric partner to the top quark, aka "stop", AND a lowest mass supersymmetric partner, which need not be the stop.
Shoehorning all this in around the Standard Model tends to lead to ugly fine tuning issues, for some unfathomable reason.

Or to summarise: PLEASE let there be something in the 1-10 TeV range...

"Flavor Mediation Delivers Natural SUSY"
by Nathaniel Craig, Matthew McCullough, Jesse Thaler (arXiv:1203.1622)

Second talk on particle detector features with different topologies - eg disconnected or delayed jets; fat jets; multi-jets; substructure in jets

ie look for new physics in more complicated phenomenology

cf "Jet Substructure at the Tevatron and LHC: New results, new tools, new benchmarks" - arXiv:1201.0008