This book consists of a series of lectures to cover every facet of the modern version of lattice QCD. All the lectures are self-contained starting with the necessary background material and ending up with the latest development. Most of the lectures are given by pioneers in the field.This book may be useful as an advanced textbook for graduate students in particle physics and its modern and fascinating contents will inspire the interest of the non-experts.
The aim of the book is to familiarize the new generation of PhD students and postdoctoral fellows with the principles and methods of modern lattice field theory, which aims to resolve fundamental, non-perturbative questions about QCD without uncontrolled approximations.
With ever increasing computational resources and improvements in algorithms, new opportunities are emerging for lattice gauge theory to address key questions in strongly interacting systems, such as nuclear matter. Calculations today use dynamical gauge-field ensembles with degenerate light up/down quarks and the strange quark and it is possible now to consider including charm-quark degrees of freedom in the QCD vacuum. Pion masses and other sources of systematic error, such as finite-volume and discretization effects, are beginning to be quantified systematically. Altogether, an era of precision calculation has begun and many new observables will be calculated at the new computational facilities. The aim of this set of lectures is to provide graduate students with a grounding in the application of lattice gauge theory methods to strongly interacting systems and in particular to nuclear physics. A wide variety of topics are covered, including continuum field theory, lattice discretizations, hadron spectroscopy and structure, many-body systems, together with more topical lectures in nuclear physics aimed a providing a broad phenomenological background. Exercises to encourage hands-on experience with parallel computing and data analysis are included.
The book is based on the lectures delivered at the XCIII Session of the École de Physique des Houches, held in August, 2009. The aim of the event was to familiarize the new generation of PhD students and postdoctoral fellows with the principles and methods of modern lattice field theory, which aims to resolve fundamental, non-perturbative questions about QCD without uncontrolled approximations. The emphasis of the book is on the theoretical developments that have shaped the field in the last two decades and that have turned lattice gauge theory into a robust approach to the determination of low energy hadronic quantities and of fundamental parameters of the Standard Model. By way of introduction, the lectures begin by covering lattice theory basics, lattice renormalization and improvement, and the many faces of chirality. A later course introduces QCD at finite temperature and density. A broad view of lattice computation from the basics to recent developments was offered in a corresponding course. Extrapolations to physical quark masses and a framework for the parameterization of the low-energy physics by means of effective coupling constants is covered in a lecture on chiral perturbation theory. Heavy-quark effective theories, an essential tool for performing the relevant lattice calculations, is covered from its basics to recent advances. A number of shorter courses round out the book and broaden its purview. These included recent applications to the nucleon--nucleon interation and a course on physics beyond the Standard Model.
This book consists of a series of lectures to cover every facet of the modern version of lattice QCD. All the lectures are self-contained starting with the necessary background material and ending up with the latest development. Most of the lectures are given by pioneers in the field.This book may be useful as an advanced textbook for graduate students in particle physics and its modern and fascinating contents will inspire the interest of the non-experts.
This book provides an overview of the techniques central to lattice quantum chromodynamics, including modern developments. The book has four chapters. The first chapter explains the formulation of quarks and gluons on a Euclidean lattice. The second chapter introduces Monte Carlo methods and details the numerical algorithms to simulate lattice gauge fields. Chapter three explains the mathematical and numerical techniques needed to study quark fields and the computation of quark propagators. The fourth chapter is devoted to the physical observables constructed from lattice fields and explains how to measure them in simulations. The book is aimed at enabling graduate students who are new to the field to carry out explicitly the first steps and prepare them for research in lattice QCD.
This first open access volume of the handbook series contains articles on the standard model of particle physics, both from the theoretical and experimental perspective. It also covers related topics, such as heavy-ion physics, neutrino physics and searches for new physics beyond the standard model. A joint CERN-Springer initiative, the "Particle Physics Reference Library" provides revised and updated contributions based on previously published material in the well-known Landolt-Boernstein series on particle physics, accelerators and detectors (volumes 21A, B1,B2,C), which took stock of the field approximately one decade ago. Central to this new initiative is publication under full open access
This graduate-level text collects and synthesizes a series of ten lectures on the nuclear quantum many-body problem. Starting from our current understanding of the underlying forces, it presents recent advances within the field of lattice quantum chromodynamics before going on to discuss effective field theories, central many-body methods like Monte Carlo methods, coupled cluster theories, the similarity renormalization group approach, Green’s function methods and large-scale diagonalization approaches. Algorithmic and computational advances show particular promise for breakthroughs in predictive power, including proper error estimates, a better understanding of the underlying effective degrees of freedom and of the respective forces at play. Enabled by recent improvements in theoretical, experimental and numerical techniques, the state-of-the art applications considered in this volume span the entire range, from our smallest components – quarks and gluons as the mediators of the strong force – to the computation of the equation of state for neutron star matter. The lectures presented provide an in-depth exposition of the underlying theoretical and algorithmic approaches as well details of the numerical implementation of the methods discussed. Several also include links to numerical software and benchmark calculations, which readers can use to develop their own programs for tackling challenging nuclear many-body problems.
Black holes exist in galactic nuclei and in some X-ray binaries found in our own galaxy and the large Magellanic Cloud. This volume focuses on astrophysical high-energy emission processes around black holes, and the development of theoretical frameworks for interesting observational results.
