The Naming of Sparticles
By Flip, with apologies to TS Eliot. (See `The Naming of Cats.')
The naming of sparticles is a difficult thought
It isn't just one of your grad student games
You may think at first I'm mad as a crackpot
When I tell you, a sparticle has three different names.
First of all, there's the name we physicists use daily
Such as stop, selectron, photino (twiddle A)
Such as higgsino, chargino, sdown, or the LSP,
Each of them a sensible physicsy name.
There are fancier names if you think they sound neato,
Some are quite playful, some are quite lame:
Such as CP-odd Higgs, sneutrino, stau, gravitino
But all of them sensible physicsy names.
But I tell you, a field needs a name that's particular
A name that's peculiar, and more dignified,
Else how can it make its gauge representation much clearer
than to write out its indices, dotting the i's
Of the names of this kind, I can give you a lot,
Such as H-up-j, B-nu, or q-LH-i,
Such as g-alpha-sigma, or else twiddle-chi-nought
Names that would make many-an-undergrad cry.
But above and beyond there's still one name left over,
The name that would make even your adviser impressed,
The name that no physics research can discover -
But the sparticle itself knows, and will never confess.
When you detect a field in profound propagation,
There's only one thing to do that's worth mention,
Time-ordered product, two-point correlation;
And compute, and compute, and compute the cross section.
That symmetrically super,
supersymmetric,
Deep inelastic nonsingular cross section.