For this multiyear project, scientists continue to use DOE leadership-class computers to advance quantum chromodynamics (QCD) research, the study of how quarks and gluons interact. Using a non-perturbative approach called Lattice QCD, the research team is calculating predictions of the Standard Model for quantities such as particle masses and decay rates, and searching for evidence of new physics beyond the Standard Model. The simulations will be used to generate new gauge configurations with up, down, strange, and, in some cases, charmed quarks at their physical mass values on lattices that are sufficiently fine grained to enable full control of systematic errors for a number of key quantities.

The new gauge configurations will be used to determine a wide range of physical quantities of importance to major experimental programs in high energy and nuclear physics. In high energy physics, for example, this project will help push the search for beyond-the-Standard-Model effects in particle physics to yet higher energies, and produce the new lattice calculations required for the DOE’s Intensity Frontier program. In nuclear physics, Lattice QCD calculations have been critical in guiding the search for exotic states of matter at the GlueX experiment, and will be essential for interpreting the results. Findings from this project will also feed into nuclear physics experiments at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB), and at Los Alamos, Brookhaven, and Jefferson national laboratories, among others.