What are the implications of supersymmetry for the Higgs boson and its mass?

[deadscientist]

Hello all,

How is it that super symmetry accounts for the Higgs having a mass and what would the 4 remaining Higgs bosons account for?

 

[kurros]

You don't need SUSY to account for the Higgs boson having a mass. The Standard Model does that just fine (the Higgs boson gets its mass by interacting with the Higgs field (roughly speaking) much the same as all the other particles with mass). SUSY can help explain why the mass is around the electroweak scale though. As for how, well it is a little technical and we'd have to start talking about the hierarchy problem.

As for what the extra SUSY Higgses "account for", well, nothing. They are just needed if you want SUSY to solve the aforementioned hierarchy problem.

 

[fzero]

Hello all,

How is it that super symmetry accounts for the Higgs having a mass and what would the 4 remaining Higgs bosons account for?

In the minimal supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM), there is a conjectured potential for the Higgs fields that leads to a mass via a slightly more complicated version of the usual Higgs mechanism. The extra Higgs bosons are just extra scalar particles (that haven't been detected, of course), which include both neutral and electrically charged particles. The masses of these particles are parameter dependent.

Many details are discussed in http://arxiv.org/abs/hepph/9709356, but you would need a good QFT background to understand it completely.