The Supersymmetry/Higgs Workshop held its first general meeting at Fermilab
on May 14-16. The Workshop itself is an ongoing enterprise which began in
February and is scheduled to wind up with a summary meeting at the end of
November. The Workshop is a collaborative effort of CDF, D0, and the Fermilab
Theory Department, and consists of more than a hundred experimenters and
theorists, working together towards a common goal. That goal: to map out
detailed, realistic stategies for the discovery of supersymmetry or the
Higgs boson during Run II at the Tevatron.

Tevatron Collider Run II, scheduled to begin early in the year 2000, will
accumulate at least 20 times the integrated luminosity at 2.0 TeV
center-of-mass energy than was delivered in previous collider runs at 1.8 TeV.
At the same time, major upgrades of the CDF and D0 detectors will provide new
and better tracking systems, a 2 Tesla magnet for the D0 detector, and the
ability to trigger on displaced vertices. The net result is a greatly enhanced
discovery reach for the direct production and detection of new heavy particles,
such as the Higgs boson or the many new superpartner particles predicted by
supersymmetry.

The Run II collider experiments will probe several dozen distinct channels
sensitive to the production and decay of superpartner "sparticles" known as
squarks, gluinos, charginos, neutralinos, and sleptons, as well as neutral and
charged Higgs bosons. The challenge for physicists is to use theories of
supersymmetry to divine all the possible ways these particles may be produced
and decay, and from this devise experimental "signatures" that will
distinguish these new particles from ordinary Standard Model physics.

At the May 14-16 meeting, conveners of the five working groups reported on 
some new results as well as on what they plan to accomplish by the end of the
Workshop. John Hobbs (of D0) described the prospects for discovering the Higgs
boson at Run II or at a subsequent Run III. While previous studies had
focused on a single experimental signature, the Higgs working group is
performing a combined analysis of multiple signatures, in hopes of increasing
the Tevatron's reach for a Higgs discovery. Howard Haber (of U.C. Santa Cruz)
showed how theoretical models of supersymmetry predict a relatively light 
Higgs boson, less than half again as heavy as a Z boson. He also described
precision data from both Tevatron and LEP experiments, which indirectly hint
at a Higgs in roughly this range of mass. The main goal of the Higgs working
group is to document what it will take to discover such a Higgs at the
Tevatron; conversely, if the existence of the Higgs boson in this mass range
can be excluded at the Tevatron, how all of the simpler "minimal" models
supersymmetry can be ruled out.

Most of the meeting focused on direct searches for sparticles at Run II.
Two working groups are organized around the more popular theories
of supersymmetry, known as supergravity models and gauge mediation models.
Another group is studying the experimental signatures of even more exotic
models, including some inspired by the theory of superstrings. Greg Landsberg
(of D0), Ray Culbertson, and Teruki Kamon (both of CDF), described several
novel strategies for sparticle discovery that take advantage of the new
capabilities of the upgraded Run II detectors. Carlos Wagner of CERN discussed
the challenge of pinning down the parameters of theoretical models by
combining data from the Tevatron with data from other colliders, as well as
contraints from cosmology.

The mood of the meeting was decidedly upbeat. Gordy Kane (of the Univ.
of Michigan) asserted that Fermilab is the best and most likely place
to discover supersymmetry. Henry Frisch (of CDF) observed that, while the
challenges are severe, both experiments will be up to the task of detecting
new particles in whatever disguises they may assume. David Gross (Director
of the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara) predicted that
the discovery of supersymmetry will be one of the most important scientific
achievements of the next century, opening the door to a truely fundamental
understanding of matter, space, and time.