ELEMENTARY PARTICLE PHYSICS

Do we really understand the fundamental forces of nature? Especially when two of these forces, the weak and the strong nuclear force, are both involved it is often very hard to tell. With the help of supercomputing, scientists can tackle one such key property, the weak decay of a particle, the pion, that is bound together by the strong force. The rate of this decay has been measured very precisely for decades, but computing it from the supposedly fundamental theory required huge extrapolations and yielded very mixed results. In project "Pseudoscalar Decay Constants at the Physical Mass Point", a team of scientists from the University of Wuppertal compute the decay rate directly, eliminating the key extrapolation. The result will clarify whether the scientists have a good, quantitative understanding of the interplay between strong and weak interaction and hence the nuclear forces that are derived from them.