Computational particle physics refers to the methods and computing tools developed in and used by

particle physics Particle physics or high energy physics is the study of fundamental particles and forces that constitute matter and radiation. The fundamental particles in the universe are classified in the Standard Model as fermions (matter particles) an ...

research. Like

computational chemistry Computational chemistry is a branch of chemistry that uses computer simulation to assist in solving chemical problems. It uses methods of theoretical chemistry, incorporated into computer programs, to calculate the structures and properties of m ...

computational biology Computational biology refers to the use of data analysis, mathematical modeling and computational simulations to understand biological systems and relationships. An intersection of computer science, biology, and big data, the field also has fo ...

, it is, for

both a specific branch and an interdisciplinary field relying on computer science, theoretical and experimental particle physics and mathematics. The main fields of computational particle physics are:

lattice field theory In physics, lattice field theory is the study of lattice models of quantum field theory, that is, of field theory on a space or spacetime that has been discretised onto a lattice. Details Although most lattice field theories are not exactly sol ...

(numerical computations),

automatic calculation of particle interaction or decay The automatic calculation of particle interaction or decay is part of the computational particle physics branch. It refers to computing tools that help calculating the complex particle interactions as studied in high-energy physics, astroparticl ...

(computer algebra) and

event generator Event generators are software libraries that generate simulated high-energy particle physics events. They randomly generate events as those produced in particle accelerators, collider experiments or the early universe. Events come in different type ...

s (stochastic methods).https://arxiv.org/abs/1301.1211 ''Computational Particle Physics for Event Generators and Data Analysis'' retrieved 8/24/20https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234060239_Computational_Particle_Physics_for_Event_Generators_and_Data_Analysis ''Computational Particle Physics for Event Generators and Data Analysis'' retrieved 8/24/20https://www2.ccs.tsukuba.ac.jp/projects/ILFTNet/ ''International research network for computational particle physics'' retrieved 8/24/20

Computing tools

Computer algebra In mathematics and computer science, computer algebra, also called symbolic computation or algebraic computation, is a scientific area that refers to the study and development of algorithms and software for manipulating mathematical expressions ...

: Many of the computer algebra languages were developed initially to help particle physics calculations:

Reduce Reduction, reduced, or reduce may refer to: Science and technology Chemistry * Reduction (chemistry), part of a reduction-oxidation (redox) reaction in which atoms have their oxidation state changed. ** Organic redox reaction, a redox react ...

Mathematica Wolfram Mathematica is a software system with built-in libraries for several areas of technical computing that allow machine learning, statistics, symbolic computation, data manipulation, network analysis, time series analysis, NLP, optimizat ...

Schoonschip Schoonschip was one of the first computer algebra systems, developed in 1963 by Martinus J. G. Veltman, for use in particle physics. "Schoonschip" refers to the Dutch expression "schoon schip maken": to make a clean sweep, to clean/clear things up ...

Form Form is the shape, visual appearance, or configuration of an object. In a wider sense, the form is the way something happens. Form also refers to: *Form (document), a document (printed or electronic) with spaces in which to write or enter data ...

GiNaC GiNaC is a free computer algebra system released under the GNU General Public License. The name is a recursive acronym for "GiNaC is Not a CAS" (Computer Algebra System). This is similar to the GNU acronym "GNU is not Unix". What distinguishe ...

.
Data Grid
The largest planned use of the grid systems will be for the analysis of the

LHC The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle collider. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008 in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and hundre ...

- produced data. Large software packages have been developed to support this application like the LHC Computing Grid (LCG) . A similar effort in the wider

e-Science E-Science or eScience is computationally intensive science that is carried out in highly distributed network environments, or science that uses immense data sets that require grid computing; the term sometimes includes technologies that enable dist ...

community is the

GridPP GridPP is a collaboration of particle physicists and computer scientists from the United Kingdom and CERN. They manage and maintain a distributed grid computing, computing grid across the UK with the primary aim of providing resources to particle ...

collaboration, a consortium of particle physicists from UK institutions and CERN. * Data Analysis Tools: These tools are motivated by the fact that particle physics experiments and simulations often create large datasets, e.g. see references. * Software Libraries: Many

software libraries In computer science, a library is a collection of non-volatile resources used by computer programs, often for software development. These may include configuration data, documentation, help data, message templates, pre-written code and subro ...

are used for particle physics computations. Also important are packages that simulate particle physics interactions using

Monte Carlo simulation Monte Carlo methods, or Monte Carlo experiments, are a broad class of computational algorithms that rely on repeated random sampling to obtain numerical results. The underlying concept is to use randomness to solve problems that might be determini ...

techniques (i.e. event generators).

History

Particle physics played a role in the early history of the internet; the

World-Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web s ...

was created by

Tim Berners-Lee Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He is a Professorial Fellow of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a profess ...

when working at CERN in 1991.

Computer Algebra

Note: This section contains an excerpt from 'Computer Algebra in Particle Physics' by Stefan Weinzierl Particle physics is an important field of application for computer algebra and exploits the capabilities of Computer Algebra Systems (CAS). This leads to valuable feed-back for the development of CAS. Looking at the history of

computer algebra systems A computer algebra system (CAS) or symbolic algebra system (SAS) is any mathematical software with the ability to manipulate mathematical expressions in a way similar to the traditional manual computations of mathematicians and scientists. The de ...

, the first programs date back to the 1960s. The first systems were almost entirely based on LISP ("LISt Programming language"). LISP is an

interpreted language In computer science, an interpreter is a computer program that directly executes instructions written in a programming or scripting language, without requiring them previously to have been compiled into a machine language program. An interprete ...

and, as the name already indicates, designed for the manipulation of

lists A ''list'' is any set of items in a row. List or lists may also refer to: People * List (surname) Organizations * List College, an undergraduate division of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America * SC Germania List, German rugby unio ...

. Its importance for symbolic computer programs in the early days has been compared to the importance of FORTRAN for numerical programs in the same period. Already in this first period, the program

REDUCE Reduction, reduced, or reduce may refer to: Science and technology Chemistry * Reduction (chemistry), part of a reduction-oxidation (redox) reaction in which atoms have their oxidation state changed. ** Organic redox reaction, a redox react ...

had some special features for the application to high energy physics. An exception to the LISP-based programs was

SCHOONSHIP Schoonschip was one of the first computer algebra systems, developed in 1963 by Martinus J. G. Veltman, for use in particle physics. "Schoonschip" refers to the Dutch expression "schoon schip maken": to make a clean sweep, to clean/clear things u ...

, written in

assembler language In computer programming, assembly language (or assembler language, or symbolic machine code), often referred to simply as Assembly and commonly abbreviated as ASM or asm, is any low-level programming language with a very strong correspondence be ...

Martinus J. G. Veltman Martinus Justinus Godefriedus "Tini" Veltman (; 27 June 1931 – 4 January 2021) was a Dutch theoretical physicist. He shared the 1999 Nobel Prize in physics with his former PhD student Gerardus 't Hooft for their work on particle theory. Biogr ...

and specially designed for applications in particle physics. The use of assembler code lead to an incredible fast program (compared to the interpreted programs at that time) and allowed the calculation of more complex

scattering Scattering is a term used in physics to describe a wide range of physical processes where moving particles or radiation of some form, such as light or sound, are forced to deviate from a straight trajectory by localized non-uniformities (including ...

processes in high energy physics. It has been claimed the program's importance was recognized in 1998 by awarding the half of the Nobel prize to Veltman. Also the program

MACSYMA Macsyma (; "Project MAC's SYmbolic MAnipulator") is one of the oldest general-purpose computer algebra systems still in wide use. It was originally developed from 1968 to 1982 at MIT's Project MAC. In 1982, Macsyma was licensed to Symbolics and ...

deserves to be mentioned explicitly, since it triggered important development with regard to algorithms. In the 1980s new computer algebra systems started to be written in C. This enabled the better exploitation of the

resources Resource refers to all the materials available in our environment which are technologically accessible, economically feasible and culturally sustainable and help us to satisfy our needs and wants. Resources can broadly be classified upon their a ...

of the computer (compared to the interpreted language LISP) and at the same time allowed to maintain portability (which would not have been possible in assembler language). This period marked also the appearance of the first commercial computer algebra system, among which Mathematica and

Maple ''Acer'' () is a genus of trees and shrubs commonly known as maples. The genus is placed in the family Sapindaceae.Stevens, P. F. (2001 onwards). Angiosperm Phylogeny Website. Version 9, June 2008 nd more or less continuously updated since http ...

are the best known examples. In addition, also a few dedicated programs appeared, an example relevant to particle physics is the program FORM by J. Vermaseren as a (portable) successor to SCHOONSHIP. More recently issues of the

maintainability In engineering, maintainability is the ease with which a product can be maintained to: * correct defects or their cause, * Repair or replace faulty or worn-out components without having to replace still working parts, * prevent unexpected working ...

of large projects became more and more important and the overall

programming paradigm Programming paradigms are a way to classify programming languages based on their features. Languages can be classified into multiple paradigms. Some paradigms are concerned mainly with implications for the execution model of the language, suc ...

a changed from

procedural programming Procedural programming is a programming paradigm, derived from imperative programming, based on the concept of the ''procedure call''. Procedures (a type of routine or subroutine) simply contain a series of computational steps to be carried ...

object-oriented Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of "objects", which can contain data and code. The data is in the form of fields (often known as attributes or ''properties''), and the code is in the form of pro ...

design. In terms of programming languages this was reflected by a move from C to

C++ C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...

. Following this change of paradigma, the library GiNaC was developed. The GiNac library allows symbolic calculations in C++. Code generation for computer algebra can also be used in this area.

Lattice field theory

Lattice field theory In physics, lattice field theory is the study of lattice models of quantum field theory, that is, of field theory on a space or spacetime that has been discretised onto a lattice. Details Although most lattice field theories are not exactly sol ...

was created by Kenneth Wilson in 1974. Simulation techniques were later developed from statistical mechanics. Since the early 1980s, LQCD researchers have pioneered the use of

massively parallel Massively parallel is the term for using a large number of computer processors (or separate computers) to simultaneously perform a set of coordinated computations in parallel. GPUs are massively parallel architecture with tens of thousands of t ...

computers in large scientific applications, using virtually all available computing systems including traditional main-frames, large PC clusters, and high-performance systems. In addition, it has also been used as a

benchmark Benchmark may refer to: Business and economics * Benchmarking, evaluating performance within organizations * Benchmark price * Benchmark (crude oil), oil-specific practices Science and technology * Benchmark (surveying), a point of known elevati ...

for

high-performance computing High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into a mult ...

, starting with the IBM

Blue Gene Blue Gene is an IBM project aimed at designing supercomputers that can reach operating speeds in the petaFLOPS (PFLOPS) range, with low power consumption. The project created three generations of supercomputers, Blue Gene/L, Blue Gene/P, ...

supercomputer. Eventually national and regional QCD grids were created: LATFOR (continental Europe), UKQCD and USQCD. The ILDG (International Lattice Data Grid) is an international venture comprising grids from the UK, the US, Australia, Japan and Germany, and was formed in 2002.

References

External links