ACADEMIA

Brookhaven National Laboratory will honor the 25th anniversary of a scientific paper first using now-standard computational techniques. It will take place next Wednesday, November 30, 2005 at a dedication of the newest supercomputer devoted to quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the theory that describes the interactions of subatomic particles. The lab is located on William Floyd Parkway, one-and-a-half miles north of Exit 68 of the Long Island Expressway in New York. QCD is largely concerned with the interactions of quarks, the particles that make up more-familiar protons and neutrons in the nuclei of ordinary atoms. “Placing” the quarks at discrete points on a geometric crystal-like lattice simplifies the study of these interactions. In the late 1970s, Brookhaven theoretical physicist Michael Creutz and colleagues demonstrated that one could compute the properties of these interactions using random numbers, or Monte Carlo techniques, to explore the vast range of possible values for the fields binding the quarks on the lattice. Creutz’s seminal paper, published in the journal Physical Review in 1980, became the most cited of the year. In honor of this paper’s 25th anniversary, leaders in the field will gather at Brookhaven for a series of scientific talks on the history and significant developments in “Lattice QCD” (9 a.m. – 12:20 p.m., Large Seminar Room, Bldg. 510), and to dedicate a new 10-teraflop supercomputer, known as the US QCDOC (for quantum chromodynamics on a chip) to be dedicated to these studies (12:20 – 1 p.m., QCDOC Computer Lab, Bldg. 515). The US QCDOC — sister to a similar machine dedicated at Brookhaven Lab in May, and also one located at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland — was designed and built by a collaboration of Brookhaven Lab, Columbia University, IBM, the UKQCD collaboration in the United Kingdom, and RIKEN (the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research in Japan). Construction was funded by the offices of High Energy Physics, Nuclear Physics, and Advanced Scientific Computing Research within the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, with operational funding coming from the offices of Nuclear Physics and High Energy Physics.