00:01
Here we're going to talk a little bit about super symmetry and why it's a useful idea in physics.
00:11
So super symmetry is a theory which predicts super partners for each of the particles that we learned about in the standard.
00:28
So all of the leptons, the electrons, the neutrinos, all of the bosons like photons, like photons, gluons, they would all have a super partner particle in super symmetry.
00:42
And so it effectively doubles the number of particles that there are.
00:47
And now each of these super partner particles also has a quantum field associated with it.
00:58
Quantum field theory is something that you may learn about much later in physics, but it's essentially the idea that all of the particles we know about are excitations, in a quantum field, the way that a photon is an excitation in the electromagnetic field.
01:17
And so what's useful about this? well for one thing, it explains dark energy and can even provide an explanation for dark matter.
01:31
There's a particle in supersymmetry known as the neutralino, and the neutralino is the superpartner, it's a super partner for the neutral bosons like the photons the z boson and it's predicted to have a mass in super symmetry but it has the lowest mass of any superpartner and so it's got the lowest mass it's neutral neutral charge and so it's expected that it wouldn't interact very much with other particles and this could be a candidate for dark matter...