Searching for supersymmetry and its avatars

Why continue looking for supersymmetry? Over andabove the aesthetic and theoretical motivations fromstring theory, there are several longstanding pheno-menologicalmotivationsforTeV-scalesuper-symmetry, such as the electroweak scale, and thelightest supersymmetric particle as cold dark matter.Run 1 of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) hasactually provided three extra motivations, namelythe stabilization of the electroweak vacuum, andsuccessful predictions for the Higgs mass andcouplings.How to look for it?There are severalexamples of emergent supersymmetry, the mostrecent being on the surfaces of topological insulators,and some sort of effective supersymmetry could beuseful for boosting the power of laser arrays. At theLHC, attention is moving towards signatures that hadpreviously been neglected, such as long-lived chargedparticles—which might be an opportunity for theMoEDAL experiment.This article is part of a discussion meeting issue‘Topological avatars of new physics’.