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Hadron
structure from Lattice QCD |
The goal of
this line of research is to understand key aspects of the
structure of hadrons from first principles using lattice QCD.
It directly addresses timely experimental developments at
major Labs. and significant physical questions concerning hadron
structure. Such studies include:
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SU(N)
gauge theories |
Recent
studies in string theory and the AdS/CFT correspondence are
beginning to shed some light in QCD, in the limit of an
infinite number of colors N. This exciting development calls
for detailed comparison with numerical simulation results of
QCD at large N.
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Topology,
Confinement and chiral symmetry breaking
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A
theoretical understanding of confinement and chiral symmetry
breaking in QCD is closely coupled to the experimental efforts at large
colliders for the establishment of the new state of quark
matter.
We are involved in a number
of developments regarding these issues:
- Development
of cooling algorithms to study instantons which are
thought to be the relevant degrees of freedom for chiral
symmetry breaking.
- Center
vortices could provide
the relevant degrees of freedom for confinement and
chiral symmetry breaking.
- The
multiboson algorithm for dynamical fermion simulations applied to the study finite temperature phase transitions for
odd numbers of flavours.
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Renormalization
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A
main line of research regards
the calculation of a number of renormalization functions in
Lattice QCD. We have been actively pursuing this topic in the
past years, with a number of collaborators from the
Universities of Cyprus and Pisa. Knowledge of these
renormalization functions is necessary in order to relate
numerical results, coming from Monte Carlo simulations, to
physical observables.
A further application is in theories with exact chiral
invariance. The fact that such theories can be consistently
defined nonperturbatively has been realized only recently,
after decades of elusive results, and at present constitutes a
very exciting and promising issue in the context of both QCD
and the Standard Model.
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High
performance computing
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The numerical simulation of QCD is computationally very
demanding and as such it is at the frontier of computer
developments.
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