McGill.CA / Science / Department of Physics

Improved actions, dynamical fermions and hadronic string breaking in 3D lattice QCD: Lessons for the real world

Prof. Howard Trottier

Simon Fraser University

Numerical simulations of QCD have undergone significant changes in the last few years, with the design and implementation of lattice discretizations that provide more accurate results on coarser lattices, at reduced computational cost.

The advantages of using these so-called improved actions are revealed in a dramatic way in applications to QCD in three dimensions (which has many of the physical properties of four-dimensional QCD). The most novel result described here is the first direct observation of hadronic string breaking by dynamical fermions in lattice QCD. The emphasis in this talk is on the basic physics of lattice QCD, for the non-practitioner. The results have clear implications for the large scale simulations that are currently being done to search (so far, without success) for string breaking in real-world QCD.

Tuesday, January 5th 1999, 15:30
Ernest Rutherford Physics Building, room 305