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| Planck Space Telescope |
Evidence of supersymmetry (SUSY) could be lurking in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), according to a UK-based physicist who has calculated how the theory could affect fluctuations in the CMB. The claim comes just a few days after the latest CMB observations were released by the team running the Planck space telescope – results that suggest that evidence for SUSY may not be forthcoming from the CMB. However, if these latest calculations are correct, the CMB could offer a window into dark matter and complement the search for SUSY at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) when it starts up again in 2015.
Back in March, the team behind the European Space Agency's Planck telescope released the most accurate map to date of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) – the relic radiation left over from the Big Bang. As well as putting tighter constraints on the age of the universe and its contents, the findings also strongly support the idea that the early universe underwent a rapid growth spurt known as inflation. In the first tiny fraction of a second, the infant universe swelled by a factor of 1078. Physicists' simplest explanation is that a single field – the inflaton – provided the mechanism for this exponential increase. Natural quantum fluctuations within the inflaton would have been blown up too and are now imprinted as the speckled temperature variations seen in Planck's CMB map.
Physics World: Are there signs of SUSY in Planck data?
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