ABSTRACT
The brief for these lectures is to introduce some of the ideas and challenges for supersymmetry coming from flavour and CP physics, aimed at an audience that includes ‘nonexperts’. It is usual for courses on this subject to jump in at the superpotential for the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model, and leave the reader to sort out for him or herself what the superpotential actually means. In this course I have instead decided to begin at square one, assuming no prior knowledge other than field theory of scalars and fermions. While it might seem a challenge to get from this point to the MSSM in a just page or two of working, this is in fact possible (and only slightly painful) if we do not spend too long worrying about things like ‘superspace’, which although quite fundamental, do not really have much bearing on the question of phenomenology. Thus the first section will develop the idea of a superpotential by giving a quick and dirty demonstration of how to ‘supersymmetrise’ a fundamental scalar. By following the (very explicit) steps in this part, those readers who are unfamiliar with supersymmetry can get a grasp of the various concepts involved. In particular we will see at first hand the famous cancellation of divergences that makes supersymmetry such an important idea. This will lead naturally to the MSSM superpotential and from there we can go on to analyse the particular problems that flavour and CP throw up for supersymmetry.
