ASK physicists what they would most like to find lurking in the debris created by experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider, and they’ll likely say “supersymmetry”. That’s because it is the best candidate for solving several niggling problems in today’s theories. But if Nathaniel Craig of Stanford University in California is right, there could be another way to find evidence of supersymmetry. It could be there all around us, in the form of ripples in the fabric of space-time.

The standard model of particle physics, which explains all known particles and their interactions, suffers from several problems. For …