next up previous contents index
Next: 4.3.5 Concurrent QCD Machines Up: 4.3 Quantum Chromodynamics Previous: 4.3.3 QCD

4.3.4 Lattice QCD

To put QCD on a computer, we proceed as follows [Wilson:74a], [Creutz:83a]. The four-dimensional space-time continuum is replaced by a four-dimensional hypercubic periodic lattice of size , with the quarks living on the sites and the gluons living on the links of the lattice. is the spatial and is the temporal extent of the lattice. The lattice has a finite spacing a. The gluons are represented by complex SU(3) matrices associated with each link in the lattice. The 3 in SU(3) reflects the fact that there are three colors of quarks, and SU means that the matrices are unitary with unit determinant (i.e., ``special unitary''). This link matrix describes how the color of a quark changes as it moves from one site to the next. For example, as a quark is transported along a link of the lattice it can change its color from, say, red to green; hence, a red quark at one end of the link can exchange colors with a green quark at the other end. The action functional for the purely gluonic part of QCD is

where is a coupling constant and

is the product of link matrices around an elementary square or plaquette on the lattice-see Figure 4.8. Essentially all of the time in QCD simulations of gluons is spent multiplying these SU(3) matrices together. The main component of this is the kernel, which most supercomputers can do very efficiently. As the action involves interactions around plaquettes, in order to satisfy detailed balance  we can update only half the links in any one dimension simultaneously, as shown in Figure 4.9 (in two dimensions for simplicity). The partition function for full-lattice QCD including quarks is

where is a large sparse matrix  the size of the lattice squared. Unfortunately, since the quark or fermion variables are anticommuting Grassmann numbers, there is no simple representation for them on the computer. Instead, they must be integrated out, leaving a highly non-local fermion determinant:

This is the basic integral one wants to evaluate numerically.

  
Figure 4.8: A Lattice Plaquette

  
Figure 4.9: Updating the Lattice

The biggest stumbling block preventing large QCD simulations with quarks is the presence of the determinant in the partition function. There have been many proposals for dealing with the determinant. The first algorithms tried to compute the change in the determinant when a single link variable was updated [Weingarten:81a]. This turned out to be prohibitively expensive. So instead, the approximate method of pseudo-fermions [Fucito:81a] was used. Today, however, the preferred approach is the so-called Hybrid Monte Carlo algorithm [Duane:87a], which is exact. The basic idea is to invent some dynamics for the variables in the system in order to evolve the whole system forward in (simulation) time, and then do a Metropolis accept/reject for the entire evolution on the basis of the total energy change. The great advantage is that the whole system is updated in one fell swoop. The disadvantage is that if the dynamics are not correct, the acceptance will be very small. Fortunately (and this is one of very few fortuitous happenings where fermions are concerned), good dynamics can be found: the Hybrid algorithm [Duane:85a]. This is a neat combination of the deterministic microcanonical method [Callaway:83a], [Polonyi:83a] and the stochastic Langevin method [Parisi:81a], [Batrouni:85a], which yields a quickly evolving, ergodic algorithm for both gauge fields and fermions. The computational kernel of this algorithm is the repeated solution of systems of equations of the form

where and are vectors that live on the sites of the lattice. To solve these equations, one typically uses a conjugate gradient  algorithm or one of its cousins, since the fermion matrix is sparse. For more details, see [Gupta:88a]. Such iterative matrix algorithms have as their basic component the kernel, so again computers which do this efficiently will run QCD well.



next up previous contents index
Next: 4.3.5 Concurrent QCD Machines Up: 4.3 Quantum Chromodynamics Previous: 4.3.3 QCD



Guy Robinson
Wed Mar 1 10:19:35 EST 1995