SUPERSYMMETRIC HIGGS POTENTIALS

My first encounter with supersymmetry was at the Warsaw conference on mathematics and physics in March 1974, the forerunner of the present-day M∩P conferences. The initial preprint of Wess and Zumino¹ had just appeared and was a subject of informal discussion. Arthur Jaffe, who immediately saw the potential of the idea, and was organizing the field theory section of the 1974 Aspen summer school, invited me to come to the school and lecture on the subject, on the assumption that by June I would be familiar with it. In this way I was precipitated into learning supersymmetry—and fast. In fact, although I immediately embarked on a study of supersymmetry from the few papers available, there was still much to learn when I arrived in Aspen. There I was overawed to find that not only was there a large and distinguished audience of axiomatic field theorists, but also large and distinguished audiences of string theorists and particle physicists eager to learn about this exotic new subject. I had to work extremely hard to prepare the lectures and I recall staying up an entire night at the Institute in preparation for one particular lecture…