Kevin Stenson

Research Interests:

I perform research with the CMS experiment, which is located inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.  My main activity is searching for supersymmetry in all-hadronic modes.  Supersymmetry (SUSY) predicts that all of the fundamental particles have supersymmetric partners (sparticles) that have heretofore been unobserved.  SUSY is an attractive theory for three reasons.  First, a sparticle may be the source of dark matter in the universe, explaining a long-running mystery.  Second, SUSY provides a way out of the hierarchy or naturalness problem about why the Higgs mass is 125 GeV when it should naturally be at a much higher energy.  Third, with the presence of SUSY, the gauge couplings are found to converge at a high energy scale, opening the possibility of a grand unified theory.  So far, searches for SUSY have all come back empty but we continue the hunt!