High Energy Physics on Blue Waters

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The long term goals of high energy physicists are to identify the basic building blocksof matter and to determine the interactions among them that give rise to the physical world we observe.Major progress has been made towards these goals through the development of the standard model, whichencompasses our current knowledge of the fundamental interactions of physics. It consists of two quantumfield theories: the Weinberg-Salam theory of electromagnetic and weak interactions, and quantum chromodynamics(QCD), the theory of the strong interactions. The standard model has been enormously successfulin explaining a wealth of data produced in accelerator and cosmic ray experiments over the past forty years.However, high energy physicists believe that a more general theory will be needed to explain physics at theshortest distances or highest energies. The standard model is expected to be the low energy limit of thismore general theory, and a great deal of the experimental effort in high energy physics is directed towardsthe search for physical phenomena that will require theoretical ideas beyond the standard model for theirunderstanding.This project directly supports this effort by carrying out ground-breaking simulations on Blue Waters. In order to understand where the standard model might break down and new physics enter, one must, ofcourse, determine its predictions and compare them with experiment. This is particularly challenging forquantum chromodynamics (QCD), the component of the standard model that describes the strong interactionsof sub-atomic physics. At present, the only means of extracting many of the most important predictionsof QCD from first principles and with controlled errors is through large scale numerical simulationsof the type that will be carried out on Blue Waters. These simulations play an important role in efforts toobtain a deeper understanding of the fundamental laws of physics. In terms of broader impacts, the project has a long standing policy to make the largedata sets (gauge configurations and quark propagators) produced and codes developed publiclyavailable. Based on past experience, the project anticipates that the data sets and codes created for the projectwill be used by others in a wide variety of calculations important in high energy and nuclearphysics.Furthermore, lattice QCD has been a fruitful training ground for doctoral and postdoctoral students. Those entering thefield must obtain a broad knowledge of computer hardware and software, in addition to a solid background inphysics. As a result, scientists trained in this field have a wide range of employment opportunities inside andoutside of academia. There are approximately seventy-fiveyoung scientists in training in this field in the United States at the present time. Some will benefit fromworking on the project, and many more from the code and data sets produced by it.