Is Supersymmetry Dead or Dying? I say no. We don't even know what susy predicts.

Supersymmetry has not been discovered at the LHC, despite a great deal of work.  My point of view, however, is that we have not figured out what supersymmetry predicts.  So the searches for it at the LHC have not been looking for the right things.

It has been known for at least forty years that a simple kind of model with susy, based on the well tested standard model of weak electromagnetic and strong interactions, without susy, just does not work.  That kind of model predicts that there should be superpartners with low mass, and they are not there.  It also predicts the cosmo constant to be 10^120 times too big.  Anyway it is very hard to get spontaneous breaking of susy in a simple model.

The solution offered for this is to hypothesize an undetectable and invisible `hidden sector' where Susy gets spontaneously broken, and then add a few hundred terms to the action that explicitly break susy, and then make the claim that this is still susy, and that the new breaking is somehow created by an unknown mechanism from the invisible sector!!!

But it is not susy at all.  It is like the Emperor's new clothes-- you can't see them.

This preposterous idea is called the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (the MSSM).  There are many papers on it, and it is also described on the Particle Data Group website.

On the web one sees all sorts of comments that susy is dead, because this silly ugly MSSM model is not working.  The worst result we could get would be if this silly, very unsatisfactory, model did work. Fortunately, even with all the parameters, none of the predictions are true. 

So what does SUSY predict, if we do it right?  That is the interesting question.  I do not claim to have the answer.  There are papers coming out these days that are at least trying to think about the problem though.