This proposal requests support for a continuing program of research in important areas of QCD, including confinement, the deconfining phase of the quark gluon plasma, and the melting of heavy quarkonia at high temperatures. The principle method used by the PI is that of Lattice gauge theory, a dicretized numerical approach to calculating the relevant physical quantities from the underlying QCD theory.understanding confinement and the connection between QCD long- and short-distance behavior is an important problem. Likewise, understanding the deconfined phase and its thermalization, as encountered in experiments at RHIC, is an outstanding problemof current physics. Yet another aspect of RHIC physics is the melting of J/psi and the corresponding bottom quarkonia in the high temperatures generated by the heavy ion collisions.
The broader impacts of this proposal include the training of students in state-of-the-art Computational physics, and the application of the computational techniques to other fields, condensed matter physics and biology in particular.
