This morning at the ICNFP 2014 conference in Kolympari (Crete) the floor was taken by Abdelhak Djouadi, who gave a very nice overview of the theoretical implications of the Higgs boson discovery, especially exploring the status of Supersymmetry models.

Djouadi explained how even if the average mass of sparticles is being pushed up in surviving models of Supersymmetry -both because of the negative result of direct searches and because of the effect of hardwiring in the theoretical models the knowledge of a "heavy" lightest scalar particle, which sits at 125 GeV- there is reason to be optimistic. He explained that for stop quarks, it is the geometric mean of their masses that has to be high, but the lightest one may be laying well below the TeV.

At the end of his talk, Djouadi explained how the LHC Run II will double the sensitivity to the lightest sparticles, and that there is reason for being optimistic as far as their detection is concerned; he then said that he would consider promising if the LHC started to observe a 2-sigma excess next year, as the continuation of Run 2 would then allow the CERN experiments to pinpoint the new physics hiding behind it.

I found this rather funny, as although in line with pre-Run-I expectations of "explosions" of SUSY signatures in cascade decays, which we had been imbued with by theorists during our long wait for high-energy data that the LHC provided with some delay, it was sort of a "self-reduced excitement threshold". In other words, while remaining highly optimistic as the time for an increase of collision energy nears, SUSY enthusiasts these days appear to have lower expectations - they would be happy to just live by a mere 2-sigma hope.

During question time I could then not control my urge to comment, and as I seized the microphone in front of me (I had conveniently taken a seat close to one of the mikes that organizers have wisely distributed around the large conference hall) I told Djouadi that I wanted to reassure him: he will have his 2-sigma effect. That is for sure - we are making so many searches for SUSY, looking at so many boxes, that a fluctuation somewhere is bound to occur.

After the talk Abdelhak passed by my seat smiling, and he explained that he would be happy to see a coincident 2-sigma effect in both ATLAS and CMS, not just a 2-sigma effect somewhere in only one experiment. Well, that may be harder to promise, but we'll make our best!