This work summarizes and puts in an overall perspective studies done within the compact muon solenoid (CMS) concerning the discovery potential for squarks and gluinos, sleptons, charginos and neutralinos, supersymmetric (SUSY) dark matter, lightest Higgs, sparticle mass determination methods and the detector design optimization in view of SUSY searches. It represents the status of our understanding of these subjects as of summer 1997. As a benchmark we used the minimal supergravity-inspired supersymmetric standard model (mSUGRA) with a stable lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP). Discovery of supersymmetry at the large hadron collider should be relatively straightforward. It may occur through the observation of large excesses of events in missing E_T plus jets, or with one or more isolated leptons. An excess of trilepton events or isolated dileptons with missing E_T, exhibiting a characteristic signature in the l⁺l⁻ invariant mass distribution, could also be the first manifestation of SUSY production. Squarks and gluinos can be discovered for masses in excess of 2 TeV. Charginos and neutralinos can be discovered from an excess of events in dilepton or trilepton final states. Inclusive searches can give early indications from their copious production in squark and gluino cascade decays. Indirect evidence for sleptons can also be obtained from inclusive dilepton studies. Isolation requirements and a jet veto would allow detection of both the direct chargino/neutralino production and the directly produced sleptons. Squark and gluino production may also represent a copious source of Higgs bosons through cascade decays. The lightest SUSY Higgs h → b may be reconstructed with a signal/background ratio of order 1 thanks to hard cuts on E_T^miss justified by escaping LSPs. The LSP of SUSY models with conserved R-parity represents a very good candidate for cosmological dark matter. The region of parameter space where this is true is well covered by our searches, at least for tanβ = 2.

If supersymmetry exists at the electroweak scale, it could hardly escape detection in CMS and the study of supersymmetry will form a central part of our physics program.