Cutting-edge research at the intersection of supercomputing and nuclear physics unravels the intricate dance of quarks and gluons within the proton, paving the way for a deeper understanding of the fundamental structure of matter.
Mapping the Proton’s Secrets
Inside the heart of matter we are witnesses to an intricate and dynamic landscape. Hadrons are the constituents of atomic nuclei, and they aren’t the kind of elementary particles that you might think of as basic. Rather, they are agitated soup of colliding quarks and gluons that simply known as partons.
Tasked with leveraging the laboratory of hadrons to expose the inner lives of these slippery constituents and how they combine into our favorite hadrons is an international team of nuclear physicists known as the HadStruc Collaboration. They are constructing a three-dimensional picture of the structure of protons with a mathematical method known as lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD) that can reveal information well beyond what is captured in PDFs, which is typically just one-dimensional.
The Power of Supercomputers
Trying to unwound the messy dance of quarks and gluons inside a proton is nothing straightforward. This is quite computationally expensive, and to overcome this challenge the HadStruc Collaboration have been using some of the biggest supercomputers in the world.
Published in the Journal of High Energy Physics, their most recent results came from an impressive 65,000 simulations run on the Frontera supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computer Center and the Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. Taken together, these simulations represented millions of processing hours that enabled the researchers to develop and fine-tune their 3D-based hadronic structure framework.
A true testament to the dedication to collective effort of the HadStruc team, truly challenging our most fundamental understanding of matter.
Conclusion
The HadStruc Collaboration measurements represent an important advance in our knowledge of both the structure of the proton and the intricacies of how quarks and gluons, its fundamental building blocks, interact. Using supercomputers, these nuclear theorists are exploring the stuff of matter itself to reveal nature’s fundamental building blocks and discover new physics impossible to uncover at any standard research facility.
