INVESTIGATION PROJECT

Computational Methods applied to High Energy Particle Physics and Cosmology

Our goal is to obtain results relevant for the phenomenology of Particle Physics and Cosmology making use of non-perturbative tools, mainly those appropriate to the lattice formulation of gauge theory, as well as new computational methods for the determination of the cosmological parameters from observations of the cosmic microwave background anisotropies and the distribution of matter on large scales.

Some of the concrete applications that we plan to cover are:

1) The study of the post-inflationary evolution and reheating of the Universe; in particular, the generation of the baryonic asymmetry of the Universe (Baryogenesis) via sphaleron production, or other semiclassical gauge field configurations.
2) The production of primordial magnetic fields, a stochastic gravitational wave background and possibly topological defects, e.g. cosmic strings, monopoles and vortices, during preheating after inflation.
3) The use of new computational techniques a la MonteCarlo for the breaking of degeneracies in the determination of the cosmological parameters from a wide range of cosmological observations.
4) The computation of some matrix elements of the effective weak Hamiltonian needed for the determination of the predictions of the Standard Model for certain experimentally and phenomenologically interesting processes.
5) The study of the relation among Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), heavy quark effective theory and chiral perturbation theory.
6) Study some theoretical aspects in non-perturbative dynamics of Field Theory, including the vacuum structure of QCD, topological defects in QFT, the large N limit of gauge theories and real-time dynamics in QFT.

On the technical side we may include the following goals:

7) The development of new computational tecniques which make use of the high parallel processing potential of the PC cluster with rapid communications (Infiniband) bought within the previous project. This will give our group the computing power necessary for the correct development of our scientific applications.