Recent Higgs boson observation and credibility of superstring theories Data are coming in, and it seems that recent Higgs boson observation is eliminating many SUSY models. If so, what is happening to superstring theories, like M-theory?
 A: The short answer is that the TeV scale data we are getting at LHC doesn't tell us anything about string theory.  Which is too bad for string theorists, because they had high hopes.
They had high hopes for the following reason:  If we had found that TeV scale physics is governed by a supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model, we would have strong reason to suspect that the effective field theory which incorporates gravity and the Standard Model is actually a supergravity theory.  Basically, we know that we live in a curved spacetime, and the only natural way to get a global supersymmetry in this situation is to have local supersymmetry, which implies supergravity.  This is pretty exciting, because all of the known supergravity theories are low energy limits of string theory.
Unfortunately, not finding supersymmetry at $1$ TeV doesn't tell us that string theory is wrong.  String theory seems to require supersymmetry at extremely high energies, like the Planck scale, which is roughly $10^{16}$ TeV.  But it doesn't require supersymmetry at $1$ TeV.  (This is not to say that string theorists haven't predicted supersymmetry at LHC.  Some theorists make more predictions than their theories do.)
So string theory remains what it has always been:  a fascinating enigma, apparently able to explain all of physics, but refusing to actually do so.
