Supersymmetry relates bosons and fermions whose spins differ by one-half. Broken supersymmetry can soften Higgs-mass sensitivity and improve gauge-coupling unification in suitable spectra; neither feature establishes that nature realizes it. Collider searches look for squarks/gluinos or electroweak superpartners through jets/leptons, missing transverse momentum and appropriate cascade-decay kinematics. Null searches constrain specified masses and branching fractions, with weaker reach for compressed or nonstandard spectra.
With conserved R-parity, superpartners are pair-produced and the lightest supersymmetric particle is stable. A neutral weakly coupled lightest state, such as a neutralino, can be a dark-matter candidate. Its thermal abundance follows annihilation freeze-out when ; later expansion dilutes number density while leaving the comoving relic abundance approximately fixed. Coannihilation and resonances can change the result. Recoil searches and cosmic-ray/photon searches test complementary couplings.
Cosmology also constrains unstable long-lived relics through nucleosynthesis and reheating; not every supersymmetric spectrum gives the observed dark matter. R-parity is an additional assumption: supersymmetry by itself does not guarantee a stable neutral relic. Laboratory discovery and a matching cosmological abundance would both be needed.
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