Communications of the ACM
Testing Technicolor Physics
University of Colorado physics professor Thomas DeGrand
Photo courtesy of Texas Advanced Computing Center
The Large Hadron Collider is attempting to produce the Higgs boson, a fundamental particle that scientists believe gives matter its mass and is a central feature of the Standard Model. However, some scientists think the Higgs boson is not a fundamental particle, but rather a bound state of new particles that have yet to be discovered.
The Standard Model involves several different particles, including quarks, gluons, electrons, neutrinos, photons, and the W and Z particles, which collectively are known as Technicolor theories. The specific theories behind the interactions of quarks and gluons is known as quantum chromodynamics (QCD), and University of Colorado professor Thomas DeGrand recently used the same techniques involved in QCD to study Technicolor theories. DeGrand's experiments relied on the Texas Advanced Computing Center's Ranger supercomputer, which simulated new particles made up of new quarks.
"Nobody knows whether any of these theories are phenomenologically viable, so we're beginning to make a map of them," says DeGrand. The simulations showed that two- and three-color Technicolor models have very different properties than standard particle systems, a key factor in distinguishing these new theories from the Standard Model.
From Texas Advanced Computing Center
View Full Article
No entries found