Summer School in Theoretical Physics

A special Summer School was held at the TUM physics department in June / July 2017: methods of effective field theories and lattice field theory were the topic - for the first time worldwide. More than 100 international participants and more than 20 renowned lecturers took part in the 10-day summer school organized by scientists from the Chair of Theoretical Physics (T30f) by Prof. Nora Brambilla. It is sponsored by the Volkswagen Foundation and is open to all students from Munich.

Physics at the frontier of particle and hadron physics features many processes whose description ranges over a wide interval of energy scales. In the physics of atoms, nuclei and particles such multi-scale processes are quite common rather than being rare exceptions. This holds for countless other research areas, in particular for many topics of the Excellence Cluster Universe. Furthermore, often the systems under study in contemporary research consist of large numbers of individual components amongst which each component reacts strongly to changes of nearly any other component. In specialist jargon such systems are called strongly correlated or strongly coupled. Quite often such strongly-coupled systems can only be studied by means of numerical simulations.

The most appropriate approach

For strongly-coupled multi-scale systems – which are quite common as problems at the forefront of research – most naive applications of numerical methods result in outright failures. For these challenges a combination of Effective quantum Field Theories and numerical computations (Lattice Quantum Gauge Theory) is the most appropriate approach.

“At least one of these two aspects is usually omitted in the scientific training, despite the fact that the interplay of both has contributed significantly to scientific progress in recent years”, regrets Dr. Johannes H. Weber from the ‘TUMQCD collaboration’. Prof. Dr. Nora Brambilla from the TUM physics department founded in 2016 the TUMQCD collaboration with Dr. Peter Petreczky from the Brookhaven National Lab (BNL) in order to access synergies between the expertise for effective field theory (EFT) in her local group and the expertise for lattice field theory (LFT) at BNL. The simulations of the TUMQCD collaboration are performed at the Leibniz-Rechenzentrum on the computing clusters SuperMUC and C2PAP (the latter is operated by the excellence cluster). The Summer school on Methods of Effective Field Theory and Lattice Field Theory’ hosted by the TUMQCD collaboration has been the first, structured, interdisciplinary training in both approaches and, in particular, at their interface. EFTs absorb irrelevant degrees of freedom into a schematically ordered set of coefficients. Lattice field theory employs numerical, Monte-Carlo simulations of Markov chain processes, which are performed on computing clusters. “With interdisciplinary symposia we already brought top notch scientists from different lines of research together at TUM-IAS”, explains Dr. Andreas Kronfeld, Hans-Fischer Senior Fellow at TUM-IAS and member of the TUMQCD collaboration, with regard to previous conferences arranged by the TUM-IAS focus group ‘Physik mit Effektiven Feldtheorien’, “now we devote our attention specifically to the scientific education.”

Any materials of lectures and tutorials are accessible to the interested public on the school’s website.

Website of the TUMQCD collaboration:

Spokespeople:
Prof. Dr. Nora Brambilla Dr. Johannes Heinrich Weber