SUSY, (death), and robots

• Andrew James Whitbeck (Texas Tech University (US))

Room: Sunrise - WH11NE Whether or not there is a natural solution to the gauge hierarchy problem remains one of the biggest questions in particle physics today. For decades, Supersymmetric extensions of the Standard Model have been a leading paradigm to explain not only the gauge hierarchy problem but Dark Matter (in versions with R-parity conservation) and more. At the LHC, Run 1 held hopes for a quick SUSY discovery, and Run 2 was a chance to thoroughly test the predictions of natural SUSY, but where do we go from here? In this talk, I'll quickly review what we learned from Run 2 SUSY searches at CMS starting with gluino and squark searches, and in particular how hadronic signatures helped redefine the question of natural SUSY. In part because of the successes of searches for strongly produced SUSY, there is a growing need for emphasis on electroweak SUSY where there is still hope that SUSY can be discovered at the LHC. I will tell you why hadronic searches have just recently become an interesting new avenue for electroweak SUSY signatures and discuss new searches that have been pushing our capabilities for discovering charginos and neutralinos. Finally, I'll give some perspective on what is to come for Run 3 and the HL-LHC. For the HL-LHC, exciting new hardware developments are underway to ensure that CMS can continue its impressive physics program with high MET events, despite the challenging new environment. At TTU, we are building silicon modules for the High Granularity Calorimeter that will replace the CMS endcap calorimeters. I'll discuss the challenges of this construction project and how we're developing artificial intelligence and robotics tools to construct future detectors more rapidly and with higher quality.