Saturday was the last day of the conference. The first plenary, chaired by Andreas Kronfeld, was devoted to the quest for new physics. Luca Silvestrini spoke about the observed discrepancies between lattice and experiment: A 4.4σ difference in the CP asymmetries in B to K π decays, a 3.8σ difference in fDs, and a 3σ difference in the phase of the Bs to J/ψ φ decay. Although the LHC is expected to give access to the low-lying part of the particle spectrum of the expected new physics, a Super-B factory will be needed to map the new physics out in detail (the MSSM has 160 parameters). Lattice QCD determinations of quantities of interest at the <1% accuracy level will be needed for these purposes.
Then George Fleming spoke about strong interactions beyond the Standard Model, where technicolor is making a comeback, since only some QCD-like versions of it have been ruled out. The interest in this area centers on "walking" theories with a very slowly running coupling. For SU(3), it is believed that there is a "conformal window" of Nf, where the coupling runs to an IR fixed point in the infrared. Simulations using unrooted staggered fermions to simulate Nf=4,8,12,16 indicate that this window lies somewhere around Nf=12.
The last plenary had Michael Teper speaking about Large-N QCD using old-fashioned OHP slides. N=&infinity; QCD is a theoretical laboratory for ideas about QCD, both because it turns out that as far as the N-dependence of observables is concerned, N=3 is close to N=&infinity;, and because at N=&infinity;, quenched QCD is full QCD, because fermion loops are infinitely suppressed by their colour factors; also, resonances become infinitely narrow as N goes towards infinity, allowing accurate measurements of e.g. the ρ mass, which turn out to be quite close to the real world at N=&infinity;.
This was followed by Hermann Krebs's talk about nuclear effective theories on the lattice. The lattice as a regulator is of course not unique to gauge theories, and nuclear theorists are now performing simulations of effective theories of pions and nucleons to determine the properties of light nuclei and nuclear matter from first principles. The low-energy constants can be either fitted to experiment by giving up an a number of predictions, or can be taken from lattice QCD (once they are determined accurately enough) for a truly first-principles treatment of nuclear physics.
After the end of the session, there was an announcement of the Les Houches Summer School on Lattice QCD in 2009. Then Kostas Orginos thanked the support staff and volunteers, before handing over to the representative of the Lattice 2009 organising committee, who thanked Kostas and his team. Everybody got their well-deserved applause, and then the lattice community was invited to come to Beijing for the Lattice 2009 conference, which is to be held July 26-31, 2009. It was also announced that Lattice 2010 will be held at a yet-to-be-determined location in Europe. And then the conference was over, and everybody said their goodbyes before leaving.
Since my flight only left the next day, I took the opportunity to visit the "Colonial Williamsburg" open-air museum, which I liked a lot better than the Jamestown one, largely because the colonials/locals just went quietly about their business without too much show or spectacle, which I thought gave one a much better impression of what life in the American colonies might have been like.
My flight back went fine, but I didn't get to post the last two summaries earlier.
