SUSY'97, which has drawn over 200 participants for some 50 lectures by top researchers in the world, is meeting here--mostly in the refurbished 200 College Hall--through May 31. Held previously in Boston, Ann Arbor, Paris, and College Park, Maryland (and scheduled at Oxford University in 1998), SUSY has become one of the most important conferences in the field of theoretical elementary particle physics, according to its Penn coordinators, Dr. Paul Langacker and Dr. Mirjam Cvetic.
In the past three decades, Dr. Langacker explained, elementary particle physicists have developed and tested a "Standard Model" of the elementary constituents of matter, and the forces between them, that is almost certainly correct down to a distance scale 1/1000th the size of the atomic nucleus. However, there are many hints that there may be an even more fundamental "unified theory" of all of the basic forces, which manifests itself on even smaller distance scales. Promising theoretical developments on "superstring theories" suggests that nature may have a simple underlying description ("theory of everything") which incorporates all matter, forces, and the nature of space and time. A fundamental ingredient of such theories is supersymmetry, a relation between the types of particles associated with matter and those associated with forces.
Both theoretical and experimental developments in this work are being reviewed at SUSY'97. For information, contact Mirjam Cvetic at 898-8153, send e-mail to susy97@dept.physics.upenn.edu.
Almanac
Volume 43 Number 35
May 20, 1997
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