Supersymmetry (SUSY) is a lovely theoretical construct, and has captured the imagination of many theoretical physicists. It allows for a new synthesis of particle interactions, and offers a new direction for the incorporation of gravity into particle physics. The supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model also ameliorates a host of phenomenological problems in the physics of elementary particles, if superpartners exist at the TeV scale. These new states may well be discovered in experiments at high energy colliders or in non-accelerator experiments within the next few years!

There are several excellent books that explore the theoretical structure of supersymmetry. These advanced texts are rather formal, and focus more on the theoretical structure rather than on the implications of supersymmetry. This makes them somewhat inaccessible to a large number of our experimental as well as phenomenological particle physics colleagues, working on the search for the new particles predicted by supersymmetry. Our goal in this book is to provide a comprehensive (and comprehensible) introduction to the theoretical structure of supersymmetry, and to work our way towards an exploration of its experimental implications, especially for collider searches. Although we have attempted to orient this book towards experimentalists and phenomenologists interested in supersymmetry searches, we hope that others will also find it interesting. In particular, we hope that it will provide theorists with an understanding and appreciation of some of the experimental issues that one is confronted with in the search for new physics.

We use the language of four-component relativistic spinors throughout this text, rather than the sometimes more convenient approach using two-component spinors.