This award provides funds to support students attending the INT Summer School on Lattice QCD for Nuclear Physics at the University of Washington.
Unlike the three other known fundamental forces in nature, the strong force is strong at relatively low energies, and consequently it cannot be fully studied through traditional perturbative methods. Lattice gauge theory is the field in which one therefore performs calculations involving the strong force numerically by discretizing spacetime, evaluating relevant amplitudes on this discretized spacetime, and then taking the spacing associated with the spacetime lattice to zero (thereby hopefully extracting results for the full "continuum" theory). Lattice gauge theory thus not only provides us with a direct non-perturbative means of studying the strong interaction, but also enables us to understand strong-interaction dynamics at the level of precision needed in order to give meaning to upcoming collider experiments. In recent years, the techniques of lattice gauge theory have even extended beyond the strong interaction per se, becoming relevant for fields as diverse as graphene, trapped atoms, technicolor, and even quantum gravity.
Despite the importance of this subject, however, there is no systematic way for students or young researchers to learn about it. Attending this event will therefore provide junior participants not only with an overall understanding of lattice gauge theory, but also with an understanding of how lattice gauge theory may be applied to the calculation of key quantities in QCD. Students who attend will also be exposed to new trends in applying lattice methods to fields such as nuclear physics, astrophysics, and Fermi gas systems.
We hosted a successful lattice QCD summer school targeting mainly graduate students (but including postdocs who had not had a lattice-QCD background) and focusing on selected topics related to nuclear physics. Connecting QCD to nuclear physics has been considered difficult in lattice QCD, but this is now an emerging subfield thanks in part to the ever increasing power of supercomputers in the extreme-computing era. With this summer school, we hope to train the next generation of students to think about ways of improving current calculations and challenging obstacles. The students included 7 women, 30 from US institutions, 1 from Turkey and 2 from India out of the total 57 students; the complete demographics are indicated in the attached figure. With NSF funding, we are able to support an additional 13 students, who are mainly from US institutions. (Most of the EU students came with their own funding, using either personal scholarships or travel grants from their advisors.) To improve interactions between lecturers and students, the lecturers were encouraged to linger during the coffee breaks to talk to students. We set up office hours: 16:15–17:00 during the lecture days. Last but not least, we hosted social events such as a Women in Lattice QCD luncheon, coffee tour and drink reception so that lecturers and students could interact in a more relaxing atmosphere, discussing such topics as career planning and work-life balance. Having the summer school at the INT was extremely helpful to the organizers, allowing them to focus on planning the lectures, since the institute staff were very helpful and experienced with similar events. They helped with processing applications, designing and maintaining the website, producing nametags and school information packages, researching daycare options for students traveling with small children and tackled complicated matters like student visa applications. The school featured 9 main courses (3 lectures or longer; mostly 5) and 7 topical courses (2 lectures or shorter). We had multiple surveys to probe the students’ backgrounds regarding computing, physics and other topics, to help the lecturers design their classes. The lecturers were asked to give the current state-of-the-art lattice QCD how-to, progress, as well as contemplating the obstacles facing future work. Homework was given at the end of each lecture for main courses, followed by discussion the next day. We decided not to include student talks in the school lectures. This helped the students to concentrate on learning in research areas with which they were not familiar, the main goal of the school. We asked the students to work on homework problems, and preferred that they learn and research the subjects and expand their background in various nuclear-physics topics. However, in retrospect, it would have been possible to organize the students into groups to collaboratively present certain extended topics related to the lectures. The lectures were recorded on adobeconnect.com, and the videos can be found at the school website, accompanied by the lecture presentation files. We have lecture notes in the process of being publishing with Springer. Student volunteers have been contributing to the writing of some of the lecture notes, under the supervision of the lecturers and organizers. These materials will benefit future students trying to get started and learn about these subjects. The anonymous exit report survey was completed by 34 students. Overall, students found the summer school very useful. A majority of students found the one-hour lectures to be the right length, the 3-week school duration to be proper, and the lecture background level to be correctly tuned. A few lectures had to change to include 2 classes each day due to the lecturers’ last-minute schedule changes; this did exhaust the students, who found the lectures too intense to digest. Without the NSF grant, we would not have had sufficient funds to invite such a diverse background of lecturers nor had a reasonable size student body for interactions among students; the NSF grant played an essential role to the success of this school.
