The heavy top quark and supersymmetry

Abstract

Three aspects of supersymmetric theories are discussed: electroweak symmetry breaking, the issues of flavor, and gauge unification. The heavy top quark plays an important, sometimes dominant, role in each case. Additional symmetries lead to extensions of the standard model which can provide an understanding for many of the outstanding problems of particle physics. A broken supersymmetric extension of spacetime allows electroweak symmetry breaking to follow from the dynamics of the heavy top quark; an extension of isospin provides a constrained framework for understanding the pattern of quark and lepton masses; and a grand unified extension of the standard model gauge group provides an elegant understanding of the gauge quantum numbers of the components of a generation. Experimental signatures for each of these additional symmetries are discussed.