Abstract
Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) is the theory which describes the interactions of quarks and gluons and how they bind together to form the hadrons we see in experiments. The study of many aspects of QCD needs a non-perturbative approach: Lattice QCD allows to address many of these aspects from first principles. Our main intents are to study several non-perturbative issues in QCD and in QCD-like theories, mostly related to the properties of the vacuum state and to the phase diagram at finite temperature and finite density, with a particular attention to the dynamics of color confinement-deconfinement and to the study of the strong CP-problem and of axion physics. Our investigations will be performed using state-of-the-art supercomputing resources and computational techniques, keeping also a careful eye on algorithmic developments and optimization to use at best HPC computing.
Within the program above, there are well known hard and yet unsolved problems, regarding in particular the investigation of the phase diagram at finite baryon density, where the path-integral measure is complex and standard Monte-Carlo simulations fail (sign problem). For this reason, we plan also to investigate quantum computing algorithms and technologies, which can be possibly applied to approach this and similar hard computational problems in lattice field theories and related areas.
Finally, numerical and theoretical tools based on a lattice field theory approach, partially inspired by those used to investigate QCD, will be developed within the program for a non-perturbative renormalization of Quantum Gravity based on Causal Dynamical Triangulations.
