CORNELL UNIV.

This article reports that for 30 years, researchers have been battling to make sense of the strong force, the glue that sticks protons and neutrons together in nuclei. Yet their best mathematical theory has been so complex that no one could turn the dense equations into useful predictions. Now all that is changing, thanks to the supercomputer's calculations. By assembling a working virtual replica of protons and other subatomic particles such as D-mesons, the work opens up a completely new way of finding physics beyond the standard model, physicists' best theory about the particles and forces in nature. This promising approach is based on a theory called quantum chromodynamics (QCD) and it goes by the name of lattice QCD. It has enjoyed a reversal of fortune in the past few months after many years when it was considered a poor relation of particle physics. While experiments churned out particles whose behaviour shed light on the internal workings of the strong force, lattice QCD theorists were left playing catch-up.