Probing Metastability at the LHC

Abstract

Current attempts to understand supersymmetry (susy) breaking are focused on the idea that we are not in the ground state of the universe but, instead, in a metastable state that will ultimately decay to an exactly susy ground state. It is interesting to ask how experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will shed light on the properties of this future supersymmetric universe. In particular we ask how we can determine whether this final state has the possibility of supporting atoms and molecules in a susy background.