Research in High Energy Theoretical Physics

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The PI is a leading member of the MILC collaboration which performs nonperturbative studes of QCD using the methods of lattice gauge theory. The goals of his program in general are to calculate strong-interaction effects in the leptonic and semileptonic decays of mesons, determining the equilibrium properties of the quark-gluon plasma produced at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider by determining the behavior of QCD at finite temperature and density, predicting new excited states in QCD that can be studied and observed in experiments, and finally to test and improve the computational methodology used by the MILC collaboration and then compare simulationsusing new algorithms with data on the properties on the light hadrons. An important focus will be to study the Semileptonic and leptonic decays of heavy-light mesons. These quantities are directly measured in current experiments and can therefore immediately be compared to the lattice calculations. He intends to determine the low energy constants of Chiral Perturbation Theory. Once these constants are computed with a sufficient precision, they can in turn be used to compute physical quantities that are itself not directly accessible to lattice calculations. Another topic that will be investigated will be QCD thermodynamics when strange quarks are added to previous investigations. This research project will lead to insight into how the theory of Strong Interactions behaves in non-perturbative regions. This is especially important in the interpretation of experiments where this knowledge is crucial such as in understanding the weak decays of strongly interacting particles, and in the quark gluon plasma. By training students in Lattice QCD the PI has given students excellent training in Computational Science which has allowed them to excel in other fields which require this training. The lattice configurations as well as the algorithms developed by the PI are made available to the community at large.