Living dangerously with low-energy supersymmetry

We stress that the lack of direct evidence for supersymmetry forces the soft mass parameters to lie very close to the critical line separating the broken and unbroken phases of the electroweak gauge symmetry. We argue that the level of criticality, or fine-tuning, that is needed to escape the present collider bounds can be quantitatively accounted for by assuming that the overall scale of the soft terms is an environmental quantity. Under fairly general assumptions, vacuum-selection considerations force a little hierarchy in the ratio between m(Z)(2) and the supersymmetric particle square masses, with a most probable value equal to a one-loop factor. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.