Multi-meson systems in lattice QCD / Many-body QCD

Abstract

Nuclear physics entails the study of the properties and interactions of hadrons, such as the proton and neutron, and atomic nuclei and it is central to our understanding of our world at the smallest scales. The underlying basis for nuclear physics is provided by the Standard Model of particle physics which describes how matter interacts through the strong, electromagnetic and weak (electroweak) forces. This theory was developed in the 1970s and provides an extremely successful description of our world at the most fundamental level to which it has been probed. The Standard Model has been, and continues to be, subject to stringent tests at particle accelerators around the world, so far passing without blemish. However, at the relatively low energies that are relevant for nuclear physics, calculations involving the strong interaction, governed by the equations of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), are enormously challenging, and to date, the only systematic way to perform them is numerically, using a framework known as lattice QCD (LQCD). In this approach, one discretizes space-time and numerically solves the equations of QCD on a space-time lattice; for realistic calculations, this requires highly optimized algorithms and cutting-edge high performance computing (HPC) resources. Progress over the project period is discussed in detail in the following subsections