Extreme QCD with FASTSUM

The strong interaction (QCD) has a rich phase structure in the temperature, T , chemical potential, μ,plane.

For small T and μ, QCD is confining, and quarks and gluons are bound into the familiar hadrons.At large T or μ, this behaviour changes significantly and quarks become weakly bound. Our FASTSUMCollaboration has a long history of using the lattice method to study QCD at these extreme conditions. We will add to our understanding of this QCD phase by running our simulations at parameter valuescloser to nature “ by using finer lattices and with lighter, more realistic quarks.

The project will study thermallight, charm and bottom quark interactions using these new simulations to quantify our systematics. In addition it will explore exotic mesons, investigate machine learning techniques in our parameter tuning, and determine the electrical conductivity of QCD across the phase transition. The research team will continue to use anisotropic lattices in order to maximise the data sampling rate in temporal correlation functions for a given temperature.