This award funds the research activities of George Fleming, a Research Professor at Yale University.
When the interactions within a physical theory are strongly coupled, many traditional analysis techniques are no longer suitable and one must perform direct numerical calculations of quantities such as scattering amplitudes and interaction rates. Such an approach typically involves what is called "lattice gauge theory". In this project, Professor Fleming aims to use lattice gauge theory techniques in order to study strongly-coupled physics at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. Although the strong interaction modelled by the theory of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is well understood, Professor Fleming seeks to understand how the nature of strongly-coupled interactions changes as one explores more general classes of theories beyond QCD. Such theories might ultimately be relevant if the LHC finds evidence of strongly coupled dynamics underlying electroweak symmetry breaking.
This project is also envisioned to have significant broader impacts. Professor Fleming has an established record of incorporating undergraduate students into his research program, with a strong emphasis on mentoring students from underrepresented groups and from predominantly undergraduate institutions. Lattice gauge theory calculations of many physical observables essentially involve extracting exponentially decaying signals from noisy time series data generated in Monte Carlo simulations. Many other scientific fields, e.g. nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and signals processing, share common challenges in data analysis of exponential time series. Undergraduates often choose this research topic because the skills they learn remain useful even if they move into other scientific fields later in their careers.
