In perhaps the largest single calculation ever performed by a computer, physicists at an IBM lab in New York have identified important properties of an elementary particle known as a glueball.
The calculation required 400 million billion operations, such as adding two figures, and took a little more than two years on a computer with 566 of the chips found in a common desktop computer.
The experiment’s results are to be published Monday in the journal Physical Review Letters. It advances the understanding of a 22-year-old theory on nuclear interactions known as quantum chromodynamics.
That theory supposes glueballs as the force that binds quarks and anti-quarks. Protons and neutrons, key parts of atoms, are composed of quarks and anti-quarks.
Physicists have been able to identify particles of a mass sufficient to support the concept of glueballs. The new research added more strength to the theory by identifying a rate of partial decay for glueballs. They are believed to decay into more stable quarks and anti-quarks.
Breakthroughs in such research, particularly at low energy levels as opposed to high energy involving huge accelerators, have only been possible because of advances in computing.
