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live for a short time before decaying into other hadrons, but from the tracks of
their decay products in the detector we can reconstruct their brief appearance and
subsequently measure their mass and other properties. In this way the particle zoo
of sub-atomic particles was discovered in the 1950s and 1960s, and new hadrons
are still being found today.
exploited by casinos.
Using the vacuum configurations, we can then do all sorts of calculations. One
of the easiest is to calculate the mass of a meson, which is the bound state of a
quark and antiquark with no overall colour charge. The meson interacts strongly
with the particles that flit in and out of existence in the vacuum soup. What we
do in a lattice QCD calculation is to introduce a quark and an anti-quark onto
the lattice and numerically solve the equations to obtain their quantum fields on
each vacuum configuration. These fields then include the effect of all the QCD
interactions between them. The quantum field of a meson is a product of the quark
and anti-quark fields, and we can extract the mesons energy or mass from the way
the field varies with time. However, to get a precise time variation and therefore
a precise mass we must average over many possible snapshots of the vacuum.
The statistical error in the value obtained for the mass falls as the inverse square
root of the number of vacuum configurations, and will generally be reduced to a
few percent if we average over several hundred configurations.
The value obtained for the meson mass will depend on the free parameters of
QCD, which are the quark masses and the value of s . These parameters come from
some deeper physical theory than QCD and their values can only be determined by
comparing the theoretical predictions with experiment. In a lattice calculation we
do this by adjusting these parameters in the lattice QCD equations until a certain
number of calculated hadron masses agree with their experimental values. The
number of hadron masses we need to use in this process is equal to the number of
parameters we need to determine. All other hadron masses and calculated results
are then predictions of QCD.
3 Powerful Computing
Lattice QCD calculations require a huge amount of computation, and test the
fastest computers that are available. If we break down a current state-of-the-art
calculation into the simplest operations that can be done, such as addition and
multiplication, then around 1019 of such operations are required. The worlds
fastest supercomputers currently have speeds of about 1 Teraflops (1012 operations
per second), which means that it can take several months to carry out a calculation.
To put this in perspective, it would take the entire population of the world over 50
years to do a similar task if everyone could be persuaded to work in unison at the
rate of one operation per second.
The size of the calculation depends on the number of points in the space-time
lattice. This in turn depends on the overall size of the box of space-time that we
are simulating, and on the fineness of the grid we are using to represent it (figure
2). The box must obviously be larger than the hadron it contains, which means it
5
down quarks since these cost the least energy to create. The lightest dynamical
quarks that theorists have so far been able to study with lattice calculations are
strange quarks, which are much heavier than up and down quarks.
However, in the next five years it will become possible to include lighter dynamical quarks in the vacuum configurations. Once these vacuum configurations
are obtained, the rest of the calculation is essentially the same as in the quenched
approximation. In the meantime, then, theorists have been honing their techniques
in the quenched approximation, making sure that all other sources of error are
under control.
parameters using lattice calculations are now among the most precise that we
have. One surprise is that the up, down and strange quarks are lighter than was
previously thought. This has implications for theorists working on the origin of
mass. A value for s is important as an input to those QCD calculations that can be
done analytically for example high-energy collisions when s is relatively small
and few-gluon exchange is a good approximation.
Lattice QCD can also help us to calculate the probability that one hadron
will decay onto another through radioactive decay, releasing an electron and an
antineutrino. A neutron, for example, can turn into a proton through this process,
which is the basis for nuclear decay. The decay of a hadron occurs when one
of its component quarks or antiquarks decays into another type of quark through
the weak interaction.
The weak force is notorious for breaking the symmetries of Nature that are
happily respected by the other forces, and the weak interactions of quarks provide
an important window onto the symmetry breaking. If we lived in a world where
the weak force obeyed the same symmetry principles as electromagnetism and the
strong force, then the universe would have equal amounts of matter and antimatter
and we would not exist! In fact, it seems likely that new physics beyond the
Standard Model of particle physics is required anyway, and we may hope to find
this new physics by looking at the weak interactions of quarks. Symmetry breaking
was first shown in the early 1960s for hadrons containing strange quarks known
as K-mesons. Researchers at the B-factories at the Stanford Linear Accelerator
Centre in the US and at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK)
in Japan are now probing symmetry breaking in B-mesons, which contain bottom
quarks, while similar experiments are being planned at the Large Hadron Collider
at CERN (see Quinn and Hewitt in Further Reading).
Because quarks are trapped inside hadrons, we cannot isolate their weak interactions from their QCD interactions. The experimental information from hadron
decays must therefore be compared with theoretical calculations from lattice QCD.
From the comparison we can hope to extract parameters that either give an internally consistent picture of symmetry breaking in the weak interactions within the
Standard Model, or pointers to new physics.
for a number of technical reasons it is much more difficult to use lattice QCD
to calculate the rates at which hadrons decay than it is to work out their masses.
However, rapid progress in recent years has led to an enormous improvement in the
prediction of the decay rates of hadrons such as the B-meson within the quenched
approximation (figure 5). For example, the decay constant of the B meson, f B is
related to the rate at which the quarks inside the B meson annihilate each other
in a weak interaction, producing an electron and an anti-neutrino in the process.
Although f B can, in principle, be measured experimentally, it is very difficult to
do in practice, and the value obtained with lattice QCD also provides a useful limit
8
JLQCD and CP-PACS in Japan; the Alpha and SESAM collaborations in Germany;
the MILC and Columbia collaborations in the US; and APE in Italy. together with
many other, smaller, transnational collaborations, the international community of
lattice QCD researchers is highly active.
Some of the collaborations have used conventional off the shelf generalpurpose supercomputers from companies such as CRAY and IBM. Others, however, have tried to save money by designing and building their own machines,
using particular computer architectures that are well-suited to lattice QCD. Some
of these machines have even then been produced commercially.
As we gain experience in lattice QCD with dynamical quarks, it is clear that
multi-teraflop machines will be needed. Although computer power at the PC
end of the market is increasing rapidly without rising prices, this is not true at the
supercomputer end. It seems clear that lattice theorists will have to design and build
their own machines if they are to afford multi-teraflop computing in the next three
to five years. These machines will be made from PC-like components arranged in
a huge four-dimensional grid with fast interconnections. A calculation can then be
distributed over the individual components that work in parallel, communicating
information when necessary. This should provide enormous computing power at
commodity prices, although the machines will probably not be very easy to use. The
main challenge is to make the communication between the individual components
fast enough so that calculations are not held up as information is transferred.
The APE, Columbia and UKQCD collaborations are already heading down
this route. UKQCD was recently awarded a grant by the UK government to build
a multi-teraflop machine for lattice QCD by the year 2003. It also seems likely
that collaborations will grow in the future, with more formal international links
along the lines of experimental collaborations in physics. In fact, the European
Committee for Future Accelerators, which is more used to advising on proposals
for new accelerators, recently set up a panel to look at the kinds of computer that
might be needed to solve lattice QCD. This move recognizes the key importance
of lattice calculations to the experimental particle physics programme.
The calculations that will be done with new machines in the next five years
will include much lighter dynamical quarks for the first time, and the real world
with up and down dynamical quarks will be in sight. When we finally reach
that goal, it will represent a huge improvement in our ability to make quantitative
predictions from QCD, and will be appreciated both by experimentalists and by
theorists searching for cracks in the Standard Model. The strong force will indeed
be tamed!
10
6 Further reading
C. Davies 1998 Lets play quantum chess, New Scientist, 6 June, pp32-35.
R. Gupta 1999 General physics motivations for numerical simulations of quantum
field theory, preprint xxx.lanl.gov/abs/hep-lat/9905027.
H. Quinn and J. Hewett 1999 CP and T violations: new results leave open questions
May pp37-42.
Review articles and research papers in Lattice QCD are available at the archive
http://xxx.lanl.gov/archive/hep-lat
(mirrored at http://xxx.soton.ac.uk/archive/hep-lat ).
7 Figures
Figure 1 : Quarks, gluons and hadrons
a
There are six different types or flavoursof quarks, known as up, down, strange,
charm, beauty and top. Their masses are very different, ranging from a few thousandths the mass of the proton for the up and down quarks, to a tenth of the proton
mass for the strange quark and 190 proton masses for the top quark. Quarks interact by exchanging massless bosons called gluons. Each quark can have one of
three colour charges red, green or blue and antiquarks can have one of the
corresponding anticolours. Each gluon carries two charges a colour and an
anti-colour with eight possible independent combinations. Quarks and gluons
continually change colour as they interact: a red quark, for example, can emit a
red/anti-green gluon to become a green quark. Only those combinations of quarks,
antiquarks and gluons with no overall colour charge are found in Nature. These
colourless combinations are known as hadrons.
(a) Mesons are made up a quark of a given colour charge (e.g. red) and an
anti-quark of the corresponding anti-colour (anti-red).
(b) Baryons have three quarks of different colours (red, blue, and green). Antibaryons similarly contain three antiquarks.
11
In a lattice QCD calculation we use a four-dimensional box of points to approximate a region of the space-time continuum. The lattice is illustrated here
in just two dimensions. In the calculations, the quantum fields that represent
quarks and gluons only take values at the lattice sites and the links connecting the
adjacent sites, respectively. To avoid large systematic errors , the spacetime box
that we are simulating must be larger than the hadron of interest. The spacing
between the points in the lattice must also be selected carefully. Since spacetime
is continuous, the lattice spacing should ideally be as small as possible.
(a) The spacing cannot be too small, however, because more points would then
be needed inside a box of fixed size and it would take much more computer time to
handle all the interactions at the additional points. Doubling the number of points
in all four directions of the box, for example, would increase the computer time
16-fold. In fact, the increase can be even worse than this in practice.
(b) If the lattice spacing is too big, however, detail can be lost that may give the
wrong answer. Weather forecasters suffer from the same problem if their grid is
not fine enough, they could miss an approaching hurricane.
12
GeV/c2
2.0
1.8
1.4
1.2
1.0
K
t
0.8
u s
P
t
t
t
The masses of hadrons containing up (u), down (d) and strange (s) quarks and
anti-quarks (denoted with a bar above), as calculated by the Japanese CP-PACS
collaboration in 1998 using the quenched approximation (filled circles with error
bars). Experimental results are given by dashed lines. The K and hadrons are
mesons, while the other hadrons are baryons. Three meson masses (that of the
, the and the K ) are not given since they have been used to fix the parameters
of QCD, here s and two quark masses (that of the strange quark and the up and
down quarks which are taken to have the same mass). The masses are given in
units of GeV/c2 in which the experimental mass of the proton (P) is .938. The
calculated masses based on the quenched approximation are in error by as much as
10% compared with the experimental results. If we want to test more rigorously
the hadron masses that QCD predicts, we must include dynamical quarks in our
lattice QCD calculations.
13
Average
Hadronic jets
e+ e
event shapes
e+ e rates
t
t
Fragmentation
t
Z width
t
Structure functions
t
ep event shapes
Deep inelastic
scattering (DIS)
Polarised DIS
Lattice QCD
decays
t
t
0.09
0.10
0.11
decay
0.12
0.13
0.14
0.15
S
The strong coupling constant, s , gives an indication of the strength of the
strong force between a quark and an antiquark. The figure shows a compilation
of values for s produced by the International Particle Data Group. The results,
which are based on a variety of theoretical techniques and experimental processes,
were all obtained by comparing theory with experiment to give a value of s at
a particular separation. But since s depends on the distance between the two
particles, the values of s obtained have been converted to the value that they
would have if the quark and antiquark were 1018 m apart. This reference distance
is relatively short and appropriate to high-energy collisions rather than the physics
of hadrons, which are about 1015 m in size. This is why s given here is quite
small. The value obtained from lattice QCD using experimental hadron masses
(red dot) is one of the most precise. The average over all the results is given by the
green dot and the dashed lines gives it error.
14
500
400
fB
(MeV)
v
v
300
v
200
v
100
v v
v
v
v
v
v
v v v v
v
v v
0
888991 9294
9597
98
99
The values predicted for the B-meson decay constant, f B , using lattice QCD in
the quenched approximation, as a function of the year in which the calculation was
published. The values have steadily converged and the most recent calculations
from groups in the UK, Japan, and the US indicate that the overall error in f B is
now only about 10%. The improvement is due to vast increases in computer power,
to new techniques for simulating heavy quarks, and to a thorough investigation of
the systematic errors in lattice calculations.
15