Münster 2002 – scientific programme

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HK: Physik der Hadronen und Kerne

HK 15: Plenary Session

HK 15.1: Plenary Talk

Tuesday, March 12, 2002, 14:00–14:45, Plenarsaal

Recent Progress in Lattice QCD — •Uwe-Jens Wiese — Institut fuer Theoretische Physik, Universitaet Bern, Sidlerstrasse 5, CH-3012 Bern

Lattice QCD provides a framework in which one can hope to understand the strong interactions from first principles. In this approach quark and gluon fields are regularized nonperturbatively on a Euclidean space-time lattice with spacing a. In his original formulation, Wilson avoided the fermion doubling problem at the cost of breaking chiral symmetry explicitly at non-zero a. Recently, the fermion doubling problem has been solved completely. In the resulting lattice fermion formulation chiral symmetry remains exact already at non-zero a. The lattice QCD path integral takes the form of a 4-d statistical mechanics system that can be simulated with Monte Carlo methods. In practice, lattice QCD simulations must reach the infinite volume limit, the continuum limit of zero a, as well as the chiral limit of light quarks. Recent progress has been made in all these directions. Still, the simulation of dynamical quarks remains the bottleneck of lattice QCD calculations. D-Theory provides an alternative formulation of lattice QCD in which Wilson’s classical link matrices are replaced by discrete quantum links to which the efficient meron-cluster algorithm may be applicable.