Sunday, January 1, 2023

Breakthrough Made In Numerically Solving Feynman Integrals

Theorists have found a way to solve complex Feynman integrals numerically by reducing them to simple linear algebra.
From Science.

If you don't know what that means, the article at the link does a decent job of explaining it at the undergraduate physics-math-engineering major level.

80% of new publications solving Feynman integrals used these theorists' open source code, which was released a year ago, to do so.

This is especially important for the physics of the strong force (that holds protons and neutrons made up of quarks together) a.k.a. QCD, and efforts to figure out quantum gravity, even though the article refers to the more familiar case of the quantum version of electromagnetism called quantum electrodynamics (QED for short).

2 comments:

Mitchell said...

This paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11637 was released a year ago and only has a handful of citations. The paper announcing the software package https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11669 has about 20 citations, but many of those are papers devoted to different computational methods, and cite their work only by way of acknowledging alternatives. The claim that "80% of papers posted to the arXiv preprint server involving the computation of Feynman integrals have used the package" seems unlikely, it may be 80% of some far narrower set of papers.

andrew said...

I'm just paraphrasing the linked article. You may be right.