The rise to fame of supersymmetry since the 1970s shook the world. It held much promise—from explaining naturalness, unifying fundamental forces, to being the ideal candidate for dark matter. But since the LHC (arguably even a bit before that), many of these dreams have been shattered by experiments. Today, the pursuit of supersymmetric theories by the physics community is a mere shadow of its former self.

This symposium is not to discuss whether supersymmetry is useful in the fields of physics and mathematics—it clearly is. Rather, this is a debate about whether its death is natural. We’ve had a crack at it for half a century. Is this the limit of what we can do? Are we any closer to achieving the original goals we set out? Is the death premature, accelerated by a negative campaign from SUSY critics? Or is it the other way around—has it been at death’s door for decades, kept alive only because authoritative figures cannot let go?

Twenty years ago, this wouldn’t even be a debate. Twenty years from now, there may not be any young people working on SUSY at all. This seems like the right time to talk.

This talk introduces an ongoing research project focused on building mechanistic models to study retinal degeneration, with a particular emphasis on the geometric aspects of the disease progression.

As we develop a computational model for retinal degeneration, we will explore how cellular materials behave and how wound-healing mechanisms influence disease progression. Finally, we’ll detail the numerical methods used to simulate these processes and explain how we work with medical data.

Ongoing research in collaboration with the group of M. Paques (Paris Eye Imaging - Quinze Vingts National Ophthalmology Hospital and Vision Institute).