SUSY 2013 Commences

Although this year's SUSY conference is being held at ICTP for the first time, the Centre and SUSY have a long history that extends to ICTP's founder, Nobel Laureate Abdus Salam.

In his opening remarks today for SUSY 2013, ICTP Director Fernando Quevedo outlined the many important contributions to supersymmetry that have been made by Salam and other ICTP-related scientists.

Through a brief literature review presented to the approximately 400 participants of this year's conference, Quevedo showed that many key SUSY concepts were originated by Salam and one of ICTP's earliest scientists, John Strathdee (a student of Salam's). Indeed, the two introduced the term "super-symmetry" in a paper they published in 1974, as well as such concepts as superfields and superspace. In 1987, ICTP scientist Eric Bergshoeff co-authored a paper that introduced supermembranes, and in the 1990s ICTP scientist Gia Dvali co-authored several papers on large extra dimensions.

The annual Supersymmetry and Unification of Fundamental Interactions (SUSY) conference is one of the most important conferences in the field of high energy physics. This year's plenary talks and parallel sessions will cover such topics as dark matter and cosmology, flavour (Standard Model and beyond), strings and AdS/CFT, Higgs physics, SUSY phenomenology, precision SUSY and SUSY models.

The conference is taking place from 26 to 31 August. For more details, visit the SUSY 2013 website.

This story is part of the Focus Feature on SUSY 2013. Go to the Focus Feature webpage for the complete coverage.