NSF Award
1615006
The long term goals of high energy physicists are to identify the basic building blocks<br/>of matter and to determine the interactions among them that give rise to the physical world we observe.<br/>Major progress has been made towards these goals through the development of the standard model, which<br/>encompasses our current knowledge of the fundamental interactions of physics. It consists of two quantum<br/>field theories: the Weinberg-Salam theory of electromagnetic and weak interactions, and quantum chromodynamics<br/>(QCD), the theory of the strong interactions. The standard model has been enormously successful<br/>in explaining a wealth of data produced in accelerator and cosmic ray experiments over the past forty years.<br/>However, high energy physicists believe that a more general theory will be needed to explain physics at the<br/>shortest distances or highest energies. The standard model is expected to be the low energy limit of this<br/>more general theory, and a great deal of the experimental effort in high energy physics is directed towards<br/>the search for physical phenomena that will require theoretical ideas beyond the standard model for their<br/>understanding.<br/><br/>This project directly supports this effort by carrying out ground-breaking simulations on Blue Waters. <br/>In order to understand where the standard model might break down and new physics enter, one must, of<br/>course, determine its predictions and compare them with experiment. This is particularly challenging for<br/>quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the component of the standard model that describes the strong interactions<br/>of sub-atomic physics. At present, the only means of extracting many of the most important predictions<br/>of QCD from first principles and with controlled errors is through large scale numerical simulations<br/>of the type that will be carried out on Blue Waters. These simulations play an important role in efforts to<br/>obtain a deeper understanding of the fundamental laws of physics. <br/><br/>In terms of broader impacts, the project has a long standing policy to make the large<br/>data sets (gauge configurations and quark propagators) produced and codes developed publicly<br/>available. Based on past experience, the project anticipates that the data sets and codes created for the project<br/>will be used by others in a wide variety of calculations important in high energy and nuclear<br/>physics.<br/><br/>Furthermore, lattice QCD has been a fruitful training ground for doctoral and postdoctoral students. Those entering the<br/>field must obtain a broad knowledge of computer hardware and software, in addition to a solid background in<br/>physics. As a result, scientists trained in this field have a wide range of employment opportunities inside and<br/>outside of academia. There are approximately seventy-five<br/>young scientists in training in this field in the United States at the present time. Some will benefit from<br/>working on the project, and many more from the code and data sets produced by it.
