Lattice gauge calculation in particle theory

Abstract

There are many problems in particle physics which cannot be treated analytically, but are amenable to numerical solution using today's most powerful computers. Prominent among such problems are those encountered in the theory of strong interactions, where the resolution of fundamental issues such as demonstrating quark confinement or evaluating hadronic structure is rooted in a successful description of the behaviour of a very large number of dynamical variables in non-linear interaction. This paper briefly outlines the mathematical problems met in the formulation of the quantum field theory for strong interactions, the motivation for numerical methods of resolution and the algorithms which are currently being used. Such algorithms require very large amounts of memory and computation and, because of their organized structure, are ideally suited for implementation on mainframes with vectorized architecture. While the details of the actual implementation will be covered in other contributions to this conference, this paper will present an account of the most important physics results obtained up to now and will conclude with a survey of open problems in particle theory which could be solved numerically in the near future.