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Physical Society ColloquiumThe Fall and Rise of Lattice QCD: High-precision lattice QCD confronts experimentPeter LepageCornellBy 1990, lattice QCD, the fundamental theory of subnuclear structure, was on the verge of failure. A decade of large-scale numerical simulations, consuming a large fraction of the cycles on the world's largest supercomputers, had failed even to produce reliable values for the proton mass. A series of theoretical breakthroughs in the 1990s, culminating in late 1999 with a new discretization of the quark action, have finally made high-precision (few percent) nonperturbative QCD possible for the first time. This seminar is a non-technical review of the conceptual ideas behind these revolutionary developments in strong-interaction physics, together with a survey of the current impact on theoretical and experimental particle physics, and prospects for the future.
Friday, March 26th 2004, 15:30
Ernest Rutherford Physics Building, Keys Auditorium (room 112) |