Hello from Southampton, where I am attending the Lattice 2016 conference.
I arrived yesterday safe and sound, but unfortunately too late to attend the welcome reception. Today started off early and quite well with a full English breakfast, however.
The conference programme was opened with a short address by the university's Vicepresident of Research, who made a point of pointing out that he like 93% of UK scientists had voted to remain in the EU - an interesting testimony to the political state of affairs, I think.
The first plenary talk of the conference was a memorial to the scientific legacy of Peter Hasenfratz, who died earlier this year, delivered by Urs Wenger. Peter Hasenfratz was one of the pioneers of lattice field theory, and hearing of his groundbreaking achievements is one of those increasingly rare occasions when I get to feel very young: when he organized the first lattice symposium in 1982, he sent out individual hand-written invitations, and the early lattice reviews he wrote were composed in a time where most results were obtained in the quenched approximation. But his achievements are still very much current, amongst other things in the form of fixed-point actions as a realization of the Ginsparg-Wilson relation, which gave rise to the booming interest in chiral fermions.
This was followed by the review of hadron spectroscopy by Chuan Liu. The contents of the spectroscopy talks have by now shifted away from the ground-state spectrum of stable hadrons, the calculation of which has become more of a benchmark task, and towards more complex issues, such as the proton-neutron mass difference (which requires the treatment of isospin breaking effects both from QED and from the difference in bare mass of the up and down quarks) or the spectrum of resonances (which requires a thorough study of the volume dependence of excited-state energy levels via the Lüscher formalism). The former is required as part to the physics answer to the ageless question why anything exists at all, and the latter is called for in particular by the still pressing current question of the nature of the XYZ states.
Next came a talk by David Wilson on a more specific spectroscopy topic, namely resonances in coupled-channel scattering. Getting these right requires not only extensions of the Lüscher formalism, but also the extraction of very large numbers of energy levels via the generalized eigenvalue problem.
After the coffee break, Hartmut Wittig reviewed the lattice efforts at determining the hadronic contributions to the anomalous magnetic moment (g-2)μ of the muon from first principles. This is a very topical problem, as the next generation of muon experiments will reduce the experimental error by a factor of four or more, which will require a correspondingly large reduction in the theoretical uncertainties in order to interpret the experimental results. Getting to this level of accuracy requires getting the hadronic vacuum polarization contribution to sub-percent accuracy (which requires full control of both finite-volume and cut-off effects, and a reasonably accurate estimate for the disconnected contributions) and the hadronic light-by-light scattering contribution to an accuracy of better than 10% (which some way or another requires the calculation of a four-point function including a reasonable estimate for the disconnected contributions). There has been good progress towards both of these goals from a number of different collaborations, and the generally good overall agreement between results obtained using widely different formulations bodes well for the overall reliability of the lattice results, but there are still many obstacles to overcome.
The last plenary talk of the day was given by Sergei Dubovsky, who spoke about efforts to derive a theory of the QCD string. As with most stringy talks, I have to confess to being far too ignorant to give a good summary; what I took home is that there is some kind of string worldsheet theory with Goldstone bosons that can be used to describe the spectrum of large-Nc gauge theory, and that there are a number of theoretical surprises there.
Since the plenary programme is being streamed on the web, by the way, even those of you who cannot attend the conference can now do without my no doubt quite biased and very limited summaries and hear and see the talks for yourselves.
After lunch, parallel sessions took place. I found the sequence of talks by Stefan Sint, Alberto Ramos and Rainer Sommer about a precise determination of αs(MZ) using the Schrödinger functional and the gradient-flow coupling very interesting.
