Searching for New Physics in the Subatomic World

 

International Conference on Nuclear Physics





Peer deeper into the heart of the atom than any microscope allows and scientists hypothesize that you will find a rich world of particles popping in and out of the vacuum, decaying into other particles, and adding to the weirdness of the visible world. These subatomic particles are governed by the quantum nature of the Universe and find tangible, physical form in experimental results.








Some subatomic particles were first discovered over a century ago with relatively simple experiments. More recently, however, the endeavor to understand these particles has spawned the largest, most ambitious and complex experiments in the world, including those at particle physics laboratories such as the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Europe, Fermilab in Illinois, and the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) in Japan.

These experiments have a mission to expand our understanding of the Universe, characterized most harmoniously in the Standard Model of particle physics; and to look beyond the Standard Model for as-yet-unknown physics.



“The Standard Model explains so much of what we observe in elementary particle and nuclear physics, but it leaves many questions unanswered,” said Steven Gottlieb, distinguished professor of Physics at Indiana University. “We are trying to unravel the mystery of what lies beyond the Standard Model.”

Ever since the beginning of the study of particle physics, experimental and theoretical approaches have complemented each other in the attempt to understand nature. In the past four to five decades, advanced computing has become an important part of both approaches. Great progress has been made in understanding the behavior of the zoo of subatomic particles, including bosons (especially the long sought and recently discovered Higgs boson), various flavors of quarks, gluons, muons, neutrinos and many states made from combinations of quarks or anti-quarks bound together.

Quantum field theory is the theoretical framework from which the Standard Model of particle physics is constructed. It combines classical field theory, special relativity and quantum mechanics, developed with contributions from Einstein, Dirac, Fermi, Feynman, and others. Within the Standard Model, quantum chromodynamics, or QCD, is the theory of the strong interaction between quarks and gluons, the fundamental particles that make up some of the larger composite particles such as the proton, neutron and pion.

Carleton DeTar and Steven Gottlieb are two of the leading contemporary scholars of QCD research and practitioners of an approach known as lattice QCD. Lattice QCD represents continuous space as a discrete set of spacetime points (called the lattice). It uses supercomputers to study the interactions of quarks, and importantly, to determine more precisely several parameters of the Standard Model, thereby reducing the uncertainties in its predictions. It’s a slow and resource-intensive approach, but it has proven to have wide applicability, giving insight into parts of the theory inaccessible by other means, in particular the explicit forces acting between quarks and antiquarks.



DeTar and Gottlieb are part of the MIMD Lattice Computation (MILC) Collaboration and work very closely with the Fermilab Lattice Collaboration on the vast majority of their work. They also work with the High Precision QCD (HPQCD) Collaboration for the study of the muon anomalous magnetic moment. As part of these efforts, they use the fastest supercomputers in the world.

Since 2019, they have used Frontera at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) — the fastest academic supercomputer in the world and the 9th fastest overall — to propel their work. They are among the largest users of that resource, which is funded by the National Science Foundation. The team also uses Summit at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (the #2 fastest supercomputer in the world); Cori at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (#20), and Stampede2 (#25) at TACC, for the lattice calculations.


The efforts of the lattice QCD community over decades have brought greater accuracy to particle predictions through a combination of faster computers and improved algorithms and methodologies.

“We can do calculations and make predictions with high precision for how strong interactions work,” said DeTar, professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Utah. “When I started as a graduate student in the late 1960s, some of our best estimates were within 20 percent of experimental results. Now we can get answers with sub-percent accuracy.”

#NewPhysics#SubatomicWorld#ParticlePhysics#QuantumPhysics
#BeyondStandardModel#FundamentalPhysics#ColliderPhysics#DarkMatter#Neutrinos

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